Rebelator by Shaman's Harvest

Album release date: March 11, 2022

"This was the hardest record we've ever made, on every level," says Nathan Hunt, referring to Shaman's Harvest's seventh LP.

The storyline seems obvious: The Missouri hard-rockers assembled this project during a global pandemic that debilitated the entire music industry. "Hard" has kind of been universal lately. But the road to Rebelator was even rockier than the band expected.

After a couple gruelling years of touring behind their last album, 2017's Red Hands Black Deeds, the band were creatively and personally drained. The quartet—Hunt, guitarists Josh Hamler and Derrick Shipp, drummer Adam Zemanek—hit the reset button hard, clearing out six months for demo construction at their Jefferson City rehearsal space.

The last two albums were hits with a combined 190 million streams between them. So, the band wanted a focus - the new album. The process was fairly haphazard at first, as they tried to regain their footing. With everyone on-hand, they'd all wake up and try to churn up ideas—though it was slow going for a bit. "We'd just sit there and noodle until the spark [was lit]," Hunt admits.

An early breakthrough was "Wishing Well," a signature rocker that pairs a detuned metal chug with a twangy, soaring chorus and subtle, yet eyebrow-raising, flourishes like fingerpicked acoustic guitar and experimental vocal effects. The ideas just kept flowing from there, encouraged by producer Kile Odell, who joined them for a month.

In keeping with the spirit of those last three albums, the band aimed to, in Hunt's words, "de-genre-fy" their music—aiming beyond the contemporary rock-metal formula to add sublet arrangement quirks.

Shaman's Harvest persevered and wound up with their richest, most well-rounded album to date – to say it is a triumph, for the band, would be an understatement.