Martial arts, impulsiveness, and doing the unexpected: How Machine Head continue to fight and win

Robb Flynn doesn’t do things the easy way. Even when he doesn’t have to fight for something, there’s an impulse that makes him want to earn it. Though he says he’s “never really looked at myself as an ambitious dude”, the burly Machine Head frontman – ‘The General’, as his apt X handle has it – has also never been a man to back down or go easily against his gut.

As a kid he was obsessed with Chinese kung-fu movie legend Bruce Lee. Rather more responsible than arsing around with weapons – “I had nunchucks, I had fucking ninja throwing stars” – young Robb’s father enrolled his son at a jiujitsu dojo, operated by notable martial arts instructor Wally Jay. As the man who basically introduced martial arts to California, Wally ran a tight ship, and an even stricter dojo. This suited Robb just fine – in fact, he would arrive early to sessions for extra sparring time, and stay on after. Here, going to-to-toe with the teacher, he’d learn things that went into the depths of what martial arts teaches a student about themselves.

“He’d put me in a headlock and he'd pin his whole body on me – a whole weight of this big man. And he'd sit there and go, ‘Fight your way out, fight your way out,’” Robb recalls today. “He'd take his gi [suit], hold it over my mouth and start suffocating me, telling me, ‘You’re strong like bull, fight your way out.’ Over and over again, he wouldn’t make it easy. He just saw something in me that I couldn't even see in myself.”

By the time he was 18, Robb’s life was somewhat different, and that discipline of the dojo wasn’t much of a feature. But that part of his personality that Wally Jay had seen and tried to cultivate remained, if in a different form.

“I got kicked out of my house. I was smoking meth. I was addicted to drugs. I was drinking every day. I still had a job, but I was floating from couch to couch. I had in a band, Forbidden Evil, and we played anywhere, just fighting to make our name. When I think about those times, even when I was in my darkest depths, I'd put on a song and it would fucking save me. It would give me the fight to last another day.”

Robb’s telling Kerrang! this story because it leads onto how, at 57 years of age, 31 years and 11 albums into Machine Head’s career, one that’s often seen him have to navigate choppy waters, he keeps thundering on.

“I’ve always just had this thing within me to put one foot in front of the other, man. That little thing inside me that’s never given up. I believe in what I’m doing. It’s not always easy, but I also know that the band is doing better than ever now, which just isn’t what a band does this late in the game.

“Also,” he grins, “I don’t know how to do anything else…”

Not for the first time, it’s a sunny period for Robb and his band. Machine Head have just dropped UNATØNED. They do so from a place of what the singer grandly but accurately calls “a renaissance” for the band.

Even having to once again find new members, replacing exiting Decapitated guitarist Vogg with new lad Reece Scruggs a couple of years ago, hasn’t dipped the forward momentum. And anyway, this was more simple than in 2018 when Robb had to essentially rebuild Machine Head following the sudden departure of long-time guitarist and drummer Phil Demmel and Dave McClain. Even here, though, as it looked like not just the wheels had come off, but taken the rest of the car out in the process, with Robb announcing a farewell tour, nobody actually believed it was The End. That's not how Robb rolls.

And he made the right decision. Their last album, 2022’s ØF KINGDØM AND CRØWN, saw them doing “the biggest numbers we’ve ever done anywhere in the world”. Headlining festivals, they appeared before some of the biggest audiences they’ve ever drawn – at Download last summer, their monumental headlining set on the Opus Stage was one of the highlights of the weekend, and a joyfully violent reminder of just how hard they hit. In August they’ll return to Europe for a run of festival headline gigs, including Bloodstock.

Even the band’s recently-released Shotgun Blast whiskey, housed in – what else? – a shotgun-shaped bottle, is doing roaring trade.

“It’s all fucking awesome, man,” Robb beams. “I couldn’t be happier.”

Which is why UNATØNED isn’t trying to repeat the trick of its predecessor. The frontman can’t help himself.

Where that was a huge sci-fi concept record that opened with a 10-minute epic that gave the listener enough time to make a cup of tea before it properly kicked in, this is the leanest Machine Head record to date. The walloping great riffs are tempered by electronics and new sounds. Describing piano-led closing track SCØRN, Robb makes comparison to the ballads of Elton John and Coldplay. We say some of this might take some people a minute. He replies that’s the point.

“If I was smart, I probably would have stopped with the last record and just never made music again,” he laughs. “For me, the biggest challenge of this record was that the last record was so massive. Fans loved it, media loved it, everyone loved it. It was amazing. I've been fortunate enough to be in this position a few times in my life where you put out a record that kind of becomes a phenomenon and then you gotta follow it up.

“What I've learned is that in the fans minds, they just want you to do the same thing, but better. But in my experience, what you need to do is go someplace else. It'll be a little rattling at first, because people want you to do the same thing, but it ends up sounding like a shittier version of what you just did.”

So, while Robb still wanted to let the music “take you where it takes you”, he laid himself a few pointers: nothing over four minutes, every song had to have an unexpected change of key, and the last chorus of each track would be lyrically the same but musically different to the first. Within this, he also leaned into impulse: writing on the road, or coming up with riffs and parts while just out walking. He talks often of “lightning in a bottle”, of how the initial seed is often robust enough to carry a song without needing too much overthinking. Even when it came to actual recording, the focus of a first go often caught the vibe perfectly. What you’re hearing, he says, is things at their most vital and organic.

“I'm a big believer in first-take magic. The first time you play something, the first time you do a lead, the first time you sing something, the first time you're playing a drum part, there's often this feeling of: I don't know what I'm doing, but I’m just going for it.

“In the past, we always demoed a lot. Even in the Burn My Eyes era, I did three demos before we actually recorded. Somewhere along that line, people remember the demo versions. 'Oh my God, there's this fucking intensity on the demo'. And you can't capture that again. And now, the way I record, a lot of the time the demo becomes the album.”

It’s SCØRN, one of the UNATØNED’s most experimental tracks, that offers the best example. Done on impulse while the inspo was hot in his nostrils, Robb says the main thrust was basically completed in two takes, as he laid down a vocal idea, then realised he’d got nothing but net just from the idea stage.

“I write most of my lyrics at three in the morning, and I have for almost 20 years now. Once I had kids, it’s the only time I can get any peace in the house. I’ve also just stopped being able to sleep throughout the night. So, I go to sleep, usually get about three or four hours, and then I wake up for two hours and then I go back to sleep. Rather than just lay in bed, I'll get up and write lyrics, I'll play guitar, I'll answer some emails, whatever. I don't go on socials – that's what I don't do. So, I wrote these lyrics at three in the morning, and they're really talking about how I don't believe in Trump, but I think the Democrats are a bunch of fucking pussies. And I feel like I'm just lost in the middle.

“I got together with Zach [Ohren], my producer, and said, ‘I have this poetry that I'm writing. I don't have a song that I'm writing this to. These are just some lyrics that I wrote. I'm going to record four chords here, and then I'm going to go sing this.’ I sang it in two takes, and when I was done, I went, ‘That's it, man. This song is done.’ So then I sent the guitar chords to Joel [Wanasek, long-time collaborator and pianist] and asked for him to do some sad piano chords.

“When it came back, I was like, ‘Wow, this is a really, really special song.’ I’ve been trying and failing to write a song based around the piano for 15 years. It's one of the best songs I’ve ever written.”

And what would younger Robb have made of something like this?

“Talking about when I was a kid, music would give me the strength to put one foot in front of the next and keep on going and keep on fighting and keep on just, you know, wanting to do this,” he reflects. “Whenever Machine Head’s career was up or down, I’ve still had that. When I write music, I'm not writing for the Spotify Top 50, I'm not writing for the radio. I'm not even writing for the fans. I'm writing my songs for that 18-year-old kid who's addicted to drugs and circling the drain and spiralling down, who just needs that one song pull him through. Because that dude was me, and I'm writing for that person now.”

Which, nicely, brings us back to the beginning. Robb Flynn isn’t a man to give up, but nor is he one to cheat at something. Keep going ’til it comes off. It’s why, creatively and in ways that can be counted on a spreadsheet, Machine Head are still reaping a good harvest. Having to work that bit harder sometimes has only had it all the sweeter.

“This is not the typical arc of a band’s career, I know. Bands aren’t normally doing better on their 10th album than they were in the early albums. It’s incredible to me. I’m humbled by it.”

UNATØNED is out now via Nuclear Blast. Machine Head headline Bloodstock on August 9 – get your tickets now.

Read this next:

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• Machine Head: Robb Flynn’s track-by-track guide to Burn My Eyes
• The 20 greatest Machine Head songs – ranked