To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens when you’re busy making other albums. After recording 2022’s Revival, singer-songwriter Judah Akers decided to creatively face the fact that his own life had imploded.

Over their decade as Nashville’s crossover folk heroes Judah & the Lion, Akers and mandolinist Brian Macdonald had built a strong enough foundation to explore both darkness and light. Not long after college, the hardcore fans of the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons made their 2014 debut, Kids These Days, then broke through with the genre-blending Folk Hop ‘n’ Roll in 2016. With 2019’s Pep Talks, they revealed the musical confidence to grapple with real life struggles, setting Akers’ candid dispatches on alcoholism and family trauma to their cohering mix of acoustic roots and Alt Rock. But throughout the creation of 2022’s Revival, after the departure of longtime banjo player Nate Zuercher, Akers kept a tight lid on some grinding personal agony that was keeping him frozen, creatively and in life.

The band had made Revival during the pandemic, with the intention of bringing more positivity to the world. But during its creation, “I was fighting for my marriage, going crazy, and getting sick,” says Akers, 33. “ I fought writing about what I was going through. Finally, a friend told me, ‘If you don't write about the biggest heartbreak of your life, you can’t be honest in your work.’ And he was right.” Since Akers and Macdonald are both sons of therapists, ideas like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief were relatively close to hand, and once Akers committed to the harder material, the concept emerged as an almost inevitable album conceit. “It gave us a way to embody the tough and sometimes really negative emotions that I deal with in songs, but within a larger framework of empathy, forgiveness, and hope.”

Like Kübler-Ross’s model, the album begins with “Denial,” a hushed invocation over wordless choral voices, the singer musing on being inside an unruly psychic process: “Just when I thought that I had accepted it/I’d just sink into another depression.” The song is like “opening the door to a house,” Akers explains. “Where you want to indicate all the rooms a visitor will find inside, the range of experiences they’ll have.” The music enacts a subtle morphing within the track, as Macdonald described playing the mixing board like an instrument, faders moving on recorded tracks—dubbing autotuned vocals, raw ones, acoustic instruments, synth washes—bringing different emotional textures to the foreground. “We wanted it to feel as if all the emotions from the record were spinning around you,” Macdonald says.

The song flows directly into “Heartbreak Syndrome,” titled for an actual physical diagnosis that Akers received from a doctor after his left arm got so weak that he could barely hold a guitar. The music itself suggests a gathering strength—a steady 4/4 beat, stark Tom Petty-like guitar riff—while the lyrics give harrowing snapshots of jealousy-deranged paranoia—"Keep driving around east of our downtown/Every black jeep that I see is making me turn around.” The mood, which continues through the nocturnal driving song spicily titled “F L.A.” (sorry, Angelenos), is often perversely feel-good. “Because in a way, denial can feel good,” Akers explains. But the music spikes this bliss with a sense of mania in the spiraling synth that enters near the end.

Over the years, as the band stepped further into the sonic space of hip-hop and EDM technology, mandolinist Macdonald has increasingly embraced his own technological naivete. “When I first started playing mandolin it was a really, really creative time, because your fingers don't have any memory of what you’re trying to play. You have this innocence that’s hard to maintain.” He found electronic instruments helped foster this sense of exploration, while framing new moods. “I prefer analog synths, because I really want to have my hands on it and play it like an instrument,” Macdonald says. “A lot of times I'm plugging in patch cables without knowing what sound I’ll get, and that sense of unpredictability really suited this material.”

As The Process moves through its Denial and Anger stages, the music finds what Akers describes as a “folk-meets-Weezer vibe,” dosed with “the mischievous pettiness and comic relief of Taylor Swift.” “We wanted songs like ‘Floating in the Night’ and ‘Great Decisions’ to feel anthemic, so our listeners could really own that anger—something I wasn’t encouraged to do as a southern boy growing up in Middle Tennessee.” This section breaks open with the rave-up “Son of A Gun,” which Akers co-sings with Judah & the Lion’s friend, the singer-songwriter Kristine “K Flay” Flaherty: “Misfit songs in a beat-up truck/I got 24 ways of not giving a single—” (You know.)  It’s a jubilant roar of exasperation in a sugar rush of tightly harmonized pop vocals.

After the instrumental “Bargaining” chimes a new stage, “Starting Over” comes on like a cold, hard morning: Akers’ unprocessed voice opens with a clear, down-home holler, his voice bringing shades of old-time mountain-death ballads to a clear-eyed present: “I sold off all of the things we bought together/All of our dreams and all of our old college sweaters.” “We wanted the music to feel like remnants of our older stuff,” Akers explains. “Classic guitar with nylon strings, that folk spirit, and the softness that comes with it.” Which makes the tougher stuff cut deeper: the grieving “Self-Inflicted Wounds,” the disarmingly sweet “SIS,” whose title reps both the phrase “suffer in silence” and Akers’ younger sis, a bedrock in his weakest moments.

The Acceptance stage dawns with the stirring “Long Dark Night”: “Where you find the light/It’s six feet deep where you got to go/To come alive.” The song, Akers says, “is about how life is sometimes backwards. You find strength from admitting weakness, freedom from telling the truth.” To evoke a more deeply rooted power, the band recorded its suite of Acceptance songs—"Long Dark Night, “Heart Medicine,” “Leave It Better Than You Found It”—in a way similar to how they used to make music when starting out. “The vocal takes are live and you can really feel that,” Akers says. “The vocals aren’t perfect but they feel good, and there’s a raw sense of being ok with who we are.”

Today, having gone through The Process, literally and creatively, both members of Judah & the Lion feel stronger than they’ve ever felt. Akers is now engaged. Macdonald just had a baby. And the band has a stronger sense of mission than ever before.  “We’ve always wanted to make music that helps people feel less alone,” Akers says. “Weirdly, the more specific you can be about your journey, the more others can relate to it. Music’s beautiful in that way, in how closely it connects us. When it’s real, you feel it, and it can really be life or death.”

“Stratejacket, the nimble, punky alt-rock trio from California’s Bay Area, have had to learn the hard way that good things come to those who wait.

The band’s singer-guitarist, Jackson Roemers, and bassist, Fabian Angel, went to the same school but didn’t form a band until after graduation. The band, which formed in Sunnyvale, California in mid-2019, managed to play one gig before Covid-19 swept the planet, effectively putting a straitjacket on their moment. But at that gig, they spotted a drumming dynamo in another band, Nate Mangold, and decided to ask him to replace the one they’d been playing with. Since the three guys, all in their early twenties, had nothing to do while Covid lockdowns dragged on, they decided to gather in a warehouse and use the Great Pause to hone their skills. They just wish they could be playing gigs.

Instead of getting mad about it though, they spent the next year and a half writing songs, practicing, and gelling as bandmates. Occasionally, passersby would stop in the street to listen to what the trio was doing and some would even dance. Stratejacket decided to keep going. “A lot of the other bands we knew were breaking up because they couldn’t see each other,” Roemers says. “It was like, ‘Let’s just make it through the storm.'” Now Stratejacket are ready to make up for lost time on their debut album, which they gave a humorously self-deprecating title. “We call it Bad Start because we had such a bad start,” Roemers says. But listening to the record, you can tell they made the best of their bad start since they’re having so much fun.

Songs like the shout-at-the-heavens anthem “Bad Start,” the ultra-melodic “Be My Drug,” and chant-ready fight song “End of Time” contain skyscraper-high hooks, overflow with dark humor, and contain the sort of electric energy that has hyper-charged the Bay Area’s punk and alternative scenes for decades. “I hope we’re seen as a response to the overproduced music that’s coming out lately,” Roemers says. “We want to sound raw and stripped-down.” But even with sparse arrangements, the group finds catchy new textures within pop punk.

Part of the band’s secret is their diverse influences. Each of Stratejacket’s musicians has unique tastes that he’s sharing been with the others. Roemers is a Beatles obsessive, hence the big vocal hooks, and he also loves Led Zeppelin, the Fratellis, and, he says, “obviously” Green Day. Angel loves Elton John and alternative rock — especially Arctic Monkeys and the Black Keys — but he has also started banging his head since Mangold, whose tastes span folk to dubstep, has been playing him metal songs.

Roemers and Angel agree that Mangold, who came up with the Stratejacket name has open up the trio’s sound. He’s like, ‘Let’s do this feel for this song’ or ‘Let’s try this,'” Angel says. “And then we’ll hear the songs differently later on.”

One of the earliest songs they wrote was “Bad Start,” which they penned in 2020 when it really felt like they’d gotten a raw deal compared to their friends’ bands, who had been gigging for months and years before them. “I wonder if I’ll be OK,” Roemers sings, “Will I ever escape this place?” before segueing into a pile-driving chorus listing all the things he hopes to overcome: A small brain, a big heart, a shut mouth, a bad start. You’d almost feel sorry for him if the song weren’t so catchy.

“It’s kind of an homage to the Bay Area, snotty, kind of angry song,” he says, referring to bands like Green Day, Rancid, and AFI who were writing punk songs with big choruses around Stratejacket’s hometown years before they formed. “It was mostly just about a really bad day.” The track almost didn’t make the cut until they saw the reaction it got when they finally were able to play it for audiences. Now they’re naming the record after it.

“Be My Drug,” a coming-of-age song about trusting the girl who’s into you, contains even stronger melodies, as Roemers sings, “She said, ‘Be my drug tonight,'” letting his voice climb as high as the feeling he gets with the song’s protagonist, Angie. “Everyone has those moments where you’re like, ‘I don’t really want to do this thing but I’m kind of pressured to do it,'” Roemers says, “and then you do it and it’s really fun.” By the end, as Angel is singing along with Roemers, they sound like they’re all having fun.

They continued to explore the possibilities of melody on “Torch Up,” a more laidback song they wrote before the pandemic, which Roemers calls “the black sheep of the record,” since it’s the most straightforward rock song, complete with backup vocal harmonies underneath his voice as he sings, “Sometimes you gotta leave to come back home.” “It comes from my love for the Beatles,” he says.

“It doesn’t always have to be 1,000-mile-per-hour songs,” Angel adds.

Mangold also wrote some personal lyrics for the album on the slashing “Cut the Cord,” which he jokingly calls “a high school heartbroken love story” but admits it’s based on true experiences, and the tumultuous “Living a Lie.” “Sometimes I don’t see myself being fully myself sometimes around people, and I put on a façade,” he says. “So it’s about letting that go and just saying, ‘Fuck it, just be yourself.'”

That attitude also helped Stratejacket play some of their first shows since they had almost a guerilla approach to gigging. They’d drive all over San Francisco and play under bridges, on beaches, and in warehouses so they could hone their craft and get a handle on what works and what doesn’t in their songs. Playing in front of audiences prompted the musicians to take their own solos, like The Who did on “My Generation,” on “End of Time” and add “Hey! Hey! Hey” refrains to the song. “We wanted to have our own little Freddie Mercury ‘Hey-oh’ moment, and make it as fun as we can,” Angel says.

As they played more, they made friends in other bands, networked, and eventually met the folks who run Edgeout Records, which signed them in 2021. When they got to record with Howes at Vancouver’s Armoury Studios, it finally clicked with them how far they’d come.

“When we got in the studio, I remember Nate saying, ‘Yo, dude, this could be the best time of our lives ever,'” Angel says. “It’s just so sick to be with your two best friends, and you’re making fucking music together, and you’re in a different place. I never take it for granted.”

“The thing about Brian is he never made it feel like work,” Roemers says. “He was always just one of us. We looked up to him. He knows that we’re a punk and alternative rock band, and we’re making this fast, energetic album.”

As Bad Start shows, Stratejacket are proud to be a rock band. “When people hear the album, I hope they feel a little nostalgic,” Angel says. “Even though the music scene right now is dominated by pop, rock & roll is still alive. I want our listeners to feel like kids with guitars and basses in their bedrooms and that they’re not alone. I want them to know that there are still little bands that want to be big bands.”

That drive to succeed has propelled them even in their darkest days when they didn’t know when they’d be able to play another gig, let alone get a record deal or make an album. Through it all, they’ve maintained optimism and hopewhich has carried them over all the speed bumps along the way. “We were like, ‘We can come out of this pandemic and do whatever we want,'” Roemers says. “We have that time to really figure out what we want to be and figure out our sound. So when we started playing gigs, we were ready.”