It's been six years since the last album of the Texas band And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead was released, which is basically just a duo. On "IX", frontman Conrad Keely and his drumming counterpart Jason Reece took it a bit easier on the album, after the previous albums had partly paid homage to the noise phase of the early work: "I actually think in trilogies", Keely explains, "and this current trilogy started with 'IX' and now continues with 'X', and the next album I might even call 'XI', haha. Seriously, I was actually referring here to our more level-headed, melodic songs from the three albums from the early 'noughties, but that came about more spontaneously when we were composing and arranging
In fact, the catchy, yet always powerful-hymnic pieces of "X: The Godless Void And Other Stories" remind us of the band's masterpieces, "Source Tags & Codes" and "Worlds Apart", on which numerous songs could have been found that would certainly have been hits in a better world. But the band was able to take much more time for the current opus than for its immediate predecessors, which - besides the singer's five-year stay in Cambodia - explains the long break since the last release. "The speculations that the band would break up were wrong. In fact, we spent a lot of time preparing and recording the new album, which we have already started in 2017. This was because our producer Charles Godfrey gave us his studio whenever we wanted. So we were able to really take off."
