Armored Saint has never been a band to stand still, and Emotion Factory Reset, their new album, is no exception. The title alone does a lot of work. Vocalist John Bush broke it down in a recent conversation with Rodrigo Altaf, and it turns out there are layers to it; some conceptual, some deeply personal.
“I always think of Armored Saint as a band that kind of touches into various emotions for people when they’re listening to our music,” Bush said. “And then a reset is kind of like when you make a record, you’re regrouping, resetting in a sense to come up with different ideas for some new product that you’re wanting to put out for the public.”
The factory part of the title comes from how Bush sees the modern recording process: each member handles their piece of the puzzle in sequence, building something together from separate contributions. “Sometimes factories can be a little cold,” he acknowledged, “but I think of this as a warm factory.”
Bassist Joey Vera had described every Armored Saint album as a new skin. Bush appreciated the analogy but pushed back slightly on the implication that the band is shedding or dismissing what came before: “Every record should be different. Every record should feel different. It’s a different time in life,” he said. “I mean, I know people love March of the Saint, 1984, Symbol of Salvation, 1991, Revelation, 2000. But the reality is this is 2026. So it’s just a different time, a different time in your life, all these different feelings and things that you’re going through personally. You kind of put that into making a record at that time.”
With no label constraints and no commercial pressure dictating the direction, Bush said the band approaches the writing with full creative latitude, within reason: “I always joke, today we’ll be in hip hop, death metal, reggae. We’re not going to put a record comprised of those three styles of music and go, ‘here’s the new Saint, man.’ We know what we kind of are — heavy metal, hard rock — and that’s the roots of it. But that being said, I think we feel like we can do whatever we want for the most part, and that helps us keep broadening our sound.”
One noticeable shift on Emotion Factory Reset is how much more Vera is singing. Bush noted it with a raised eyebrow and a grin: “Joey‘s singing his butt off. I don’t know if he’s vying for the lead vocal position in the band now or what, but he’s singing great.”
Guitarist Jeff Duncan also contributes background vocals, and bassist Phil Sandoval has been flexing his voice in a blues side project. “I don’t know if these guys are all trying to get in on my job here,” Bush deadpanned. “But it just broadens the Armored Saint sound, which is cool.”
The lead single, “Close to the Bone,” dealt with the tension of swallowing disagreement rather than confronting it, and Bush sees it as something bigger than a personal grievance: “It’s that fine line of how much do you get into battles and you pick your battles,” he said. “The Internet and the digital world we live in — you can go into comment sections and write whatever you want. Nobody really knows you. You’re kind of hidden behind this veil, which to me is almost cowardly.” He paused, then widened the lens. “What I’ve been telling people lately is we’re struggling as a society where people just don’t want to listen that much. Everybody wants to throw out their thoughts, but how many people are stopping and saying, let me hear what you’re saying?”
The follow-up single, “Hit a Moonshot,” came with a video that Bush described as funny, stunt-filled, and cool in equal measure. True to form, the song borrows a sports metaphor: a Bush trademark stretching back to titles like “Left Hook from Right Field” and “Punching the Sky.” Here, the baseball term gets repurposed to describe someone who always manages to land on their feet regardless of how badly things go sideways.
“It kind of has a little sarcastic drive to it,” he said.
“Every Man-Any Man” operated in similar territory, examining the idea that everything has a price and someone is willing to pay it. Bush was careful to frame it as an observation rather than a lecture: “My objective is not to tell people what to think. Too many people are trying to do that. My idea is just to raise thoughts and go, ‘take a look at this perspective — what are your feelings on it?'” He added that the ambiguity is intentional. “Sometimes I write a song, and then 10 years later it means something completely different. It makes it timeless.”
The album’s most personal moment is “Buckeye,” written about his daughter leaving for college in Ohio. Bush was visibly proud of it: “I love the intro and the intro is the outro — it’s full circle. It kind of has a Zeppelin-y style to the beat and the groove. Big vocals, big chorus.” Despite the specific trigger, he sees the song as open-ended enough to resonate beyond its origins. “It could be about the void of people leaving, separation, or somebody dying. That void of separation — it could be various emotions. Because that’s how I felt with her leaving: I was very sad, but at the same time very proud. I had some anxiety. All those things.”
His daughter has since gone on a semester abroad in Rome, which the family visited a few weeks before the interview. “To see her growth,” Bush said. “It was awesome.”
On the album’s artwork — the Armored Saint mascot rendered against an industrial backdrop — Bush explained that the band deliberately wanted to avoid repeating the purely medieval aesthetic of earlier covers. “It’s hard to beat March of the Saint — that cover is spectacular,” he said. The solution was to combine eras: the armored knight set against a factory landscape, collapsing centuries into one image. Vera oversaw the art direction, working with an artist in Europe. “The knight came out great,” Bush said. “The guy did a spectacular job.”
Beyond the new album, Bush has been gradually activating his catalog from his Anthrax years. Three shows in December went over well enough to confirm that he wants to do more, though the timing has to work around Armored Saint commitments: “It was a lot of me talking about it for years,” he said. “So yeah, it was good to say, okay, I’m not talking anymore about it, I’m doing it. And it was so fun. The fans were just very, very excited and emotional about hearing those tunes.”
He’s equally sanguine about the online debates that inevitably pit different Anthrax eras against each other: “If you’re negative towards me, you’ve got to be funny. If you’re funny and disparaging, I’ll think it’s amusing. ‘That guy sucks’ — come on, you can’t come up with anything better than that?” He shrugged off the tribalism altogether. “You can like both. You don’t have to pick a side. Heaven and Hell is pretty much a flawless record, but so is Paranoid. So what are you gonna do?”
Category Seven, his heavier side project, is also stirring. Bush said he’s been working on new material, though he’s making a point of clearing his head of the Armored Saint sessions first: “I have to exercise all the work I did with Armored Saint to kind of get it out of my system, see something new from a fresh perspective. Otherwise, I’m going to phone it in, and that’s the last thing I want to do with anything.”
As for live plans, Armored Saint has a packed stretch ahead: a show at the Rainbow Bar & Grill parking lot party in Los Angeles, the Milwaukee Metal Fest, a date outside Mexico City, and a run of European dates that includes Sweden and Poland; the latter alongside Sabaton and Testament. Some dates with Metal Church are also on the schedule, a prospect Bush welcomed, given his friendship with vocalist Dave Ellefson. North American touring is still being worked out, but Bush was clear that Canada is on the list: “Montreal and Toronto — some of the best cities in the world for metal, for sure.”
Emotion Factory Reset is out now. Grab your copy here.
