Shihad will be releasing their 10th studio album, Old Gods, this month after a seven-year hiatus since their last album.
Band members Jon Toogood and Karl Kippenberger join Jesse Mulligan to talk about what they have been up to and what fans can expect on 24 August.
Shihad - Old Gods Photo: Warner Music
The latest album highlights in particular Jon Toogood's perspective on the world since he started a family, converted to Islam, his soul searching as a result of Covid-19, and the turmoil around the world.
Toogood told Afternoons he has been listening to Old Gods non-stop since it was complete.
"It makes me feel good to be human basically. It's like the rock music that I needed to hear for the last six years of waking up for four years of Trump, checking my phone to see if the world was ending again every morning, and going 'oh my God, what is going on?'"
Shihad was still working on music behind the scenes, despite their absence, he says.
"My partner and I, we had two children and for the first time in my life since I was 18, I didn't have any desire to write at all because I was just like kids and no sleep. My priorities just shifted.
"But ... we were still meeting up every six months just to have a jam session, making music, compiling good ideas, folding them away."
The pandemic was the catalyst for the band gathering pace and making use of their stored music.
"Luckily, I had a collection of four years of extremely heavy music that Shihad had written," Toogood says.
"It just so happens that I've written all this stuff while we've made the best music we've ever made."
Kippenberger says he felt desperate when he was stuck in New Zealand during the lockdown while his bandmates were overseas.
"We kind of played a lot of FVEY through those years, but ... I definitely had feelings that we may not do it again ... and obviously touring is still a question mark around the world.
"I went over for a couple of months this year, February, March to do this record and it was just so great to get back together and see the boys."
Birds of Tokyo's Adam Spark, who first saw Shihad at the Big Day Out as an aspiring musician, produced Old Gods with the intent to capture the same feeling of the band playing live.
"[I] just let it all come out naturally. We thought about what is the overarching theme, it's just inequality, just dealing with things getting out of balance," Toogood says.
"We're referencing bands like Rage Against the Machine, Fugazi, we wanted to be honest as hell. We knew we were going to maybe piss off some people along the way, but there's nothing on this record, I don't believe in 100 percent."
It's not the only controversy on the record - Toogood says there has been some "kickback against" the cover image of Captain Cook being spray painted.
"It's supposed to provoke a talk, not an argument, but a conversation."
While watching the Black Lives Matter movement and race issues in the spotlight in America, he says he couldn't help but think of his children's future.
"I'm thinking this doesn't bode well for the future that my children have to f---ing deal with.
"Also, during the lockdown, George Floyd was murdered, and I naively turned to my wife and said, 'isn't it great seeing white people protesting with black people?' And she went 'you think that's all you have to do after everything you guys have put us through?'
"I was like 'oh right, sorry I hadn't thought of it like that because I'm a white male'. For her, it was traumatic. It brought up every time she had to grit her teeth around casually racist comments, every time she had to be overly nice in a white space, just to make sure everyone was comfortable, and she was exhausted.
"I just went right, I've got to acknowledge the history of where I come from, acknowledge my place and my privilege, and I want to talk about it."
Kippenberger says Toogood's words resonated with him.
"I grew up in Pukerua Bay down in Wellington way, beautiful little place, and even at my school I put up with a lot of racism put towards me.
"You definitely learn pretty quickly to be a polite young boy and to be put in your place a bit, but again that's been my life and I kind of gotten used to that. I know that my cousins up here in Mount Roskill in Auckland had a way worse life than I did dealing with all that stuff."
So Toogood decided to use the band's latest record to make a statement about powerful people who "don't care about humans", he says.
"Yet I still saw people supporting them even after all this evidence right in front of their eyes. I went no more. I'm just going to use this music to say no."
Kippenberger says the band's common ground has been politics, which is something they always discussed.
"We've all had a different path in this way, but first and foremost for me, I'm a sonic human being, so I love creating the music side of things."
