Black Veil Brides have never been a band that softens the edges, and Vindicate, out today (May 8) via Spinefarm, is their most unguarded record yet. Driven by heavy-hitting anthems like “Bleeders,” “Revenger,” and the title track, it channels the accumulated weight of years of grievances into something that hits with real force. But it also makes room for something more unexpected: a pop crossover duet called “Cut” featuring frontman Andy Biersack‘s wife, Lilith Czar, that stands as one of the album’s most memorable moments. Throughout, the band draws on their legacy while pushing their sound into more aggressive, more fully realized territory than they’ve occupied before.
Robert Cavuoto spoke with Biersack, who was candid about where the record’s energy actually comes from. “This is the most honest record that we’ve made,” Biersack said. “I am someone who is incredibly. I always joke with Kevin. I have a list of everything that I’ve ever seen someone do wrong to me, and I sort of keep it in my mind. It has motivated me from the time I was six years old and starting to play hockey as a kid, to being 35 years old, and it’s still a deeply motivating thing.
“As I’ve gotten older, I have found that there is a real hollowness to the sort of revenge-oriented lifestyle, and yet I still find myself compelled to go, oh, fuck that person, I’m going to show them they’re wrong. I wanted to show the real truth of how I operate in my mind and the things I think about. I think a lot of people feel that way. It could be something as small as your boss at work being a piece of shit and not respecting you, or it could be some sort of family issue. I just wanted to make a record that was very brutally honest in that way,” he added.
The music followed the lyrics rather than the other way around. Biersack and guitarist Jake Pitts co-produced the album together, and the heavier direction emerged organically from the writing rather than from any upfront decision to go in a specific direction. “We didn’t set out to go, hey, let’s make a heavy record, it was not a committee decision,” Biersack said. “The moments on the record that are not heavy shine that much more, because they’re within the context of these very heavy songs. A song like ‘Cut,’ or the outro song ‘Eschaton,’ they feel more grand in scale because they’re surrounded by these very aggressive, vitriolic moments.”
The album’s two orchestral interludes, “Purgatory” and “Grace,” were handled by multi-instrumentalist Jinxx, who wrote the charts, conducted, and brought in a full live orchestra for the sessions. “When you have somebody like Jinxx in a band, you would be a fool not to include all of his skill sets,” Biersack said. “There’s not really anybody in our scene or era that has that breadth of musical knowledge as he does.”
Part of what makes Vindicate feel like a return to form is the way it was built. Biersack traced the band’s recording history to explain why this one lands differently, noting that their early records were assembled from pre-written Jake and Jinxx compositions that he then layered melody and lyrics on top of. That process gave way over the years to writing in the studio with outside producers. On Vindicate, the band went back to the original approach, with Jake developing demos for every track before they entered the studio in Florida. “That’s where you start to get the ways that the ‘Set the World on Fire’ guitar elements were produced out of us over the years without someone else kind of poo-pooing that sound,” Biersack said. “You get that very technical, very grandiose, very fast-paced kind of stuff that you had on ‘Set the World on Fire’ that you now get again with this record.”
“Bleeders,” the lone track not self-produced by the band, was originally released as a standalone single in 2024 and went on to perform well at radio before becoming the anchor point for the album that eventually grew around it. “We worked the fuck out of that song and really, really wanted it to be something special,” Biersack said. “When it succeeded, it was more of a, oh, good. We put it all out there. Thank God, you know.”
The most unexpected song on the record is “Cut,” which came together through a combination of sources. An early demo seed arrived from Ben Bruce, formerly of Asking Alexandria, who heard something in the idea that felt like Black Veil Brides. Jake and Jinxx refined the musical foundation, Biersack wrote the lyrics and adjusted the melodies for his voice, and the whole thing started coming together unusually fast. “Immediately, I was listening to it in the car, and I thought, Lilith‘s voice on this would be perfect,” Biersack said. “She immediately made it her own. Even the little changes that are in the second verse, they give it a little bit more flair. I would put it in the canon of one of my favorite songs we’ve ever done.”
The conversation also touched on the loss of Ace Frehley, whose death hit Biersack harder than he expected for someone he’d met but never truly known. “I told my wife, it just felt very strange because it did feel like losing someone that you knew,” he said. “I have no shared memories with Ace. The shared memories I have are with me. All of the photos on the walls, the makeup, the toys, everything. That’s a shared memory that he doesn’t know about. But it is meaningful to me.”
Black Veil Brides kicked off a 24-city North American headline tour on April 25, and information for VIP and tickets can be found here. You can also order your copy of Vindicate here
