''The Betrayed'' is the fourth studio album by Welsh
rock
Rock most often refers to:
* Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids
* Rock music, a genre of popular music
Rock or Rocks may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
* Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wales ...
band
Lostprophets
Lostprophets (stylised as lostprophets) were a Welsh rock band from Pontypridd, formed in 1997 by singer and lyricist Ian Watkins and guitarist Lee Gaze. The band was founded after their former band Fleshbind broke up. They later recruited Mike ...
, released through
Visible Noise
Visible Noise is a British independent record label that focuses solely on British bands.
History
Founded in 1998 by ex-Cacophonous Records manager Julie Weir, the label was created with the goal of fostering and breaking new UK rock music into ...
and
Sony Music
Sony Music Entertainment (SME), also known as simply Sony Music, is an American multinational music company. Being owned by the parent conglomerate Sony Group Corporation, it is part of the Sony Music Group, which is owned by Sony Entertainment ...
on 13 January 2010. Although the band initially wished to record a quick follow-up to 2006's ''
Liberation Transmission
''Liberation Transmission'' is the third studio album by Welsh rock band Lostprophets, released on 26 June 2006 by Visible Noise.
Recording
This is the first Lostprophets album recorded without original drummer Mike Chiplin. Josh Freese drummed ...
'', problems with labels and producers led to numerous delays. Consequently, tracks from the album were performed live as early as 2007, but recording was not completed until July 2009, following an entire album's worth of material being scrapped by the band.
The singles include: "
It's Not the End of the World, But I Can See It from Here", "
Where We Belong" and "
For He's a Jolly Good Felon". "A Better Nothing" was set to be the fourth single, but it was cancelled due to the poor charting of "For He's a Jolly Good Felon". Although drummer Ilan Rubin left the band before the album's release, his drum tracks were still kept on the finalized product.
Writing and recording
Having started writing new tracks between tour dates in 2006 and 2007,
Lostprophets debuted several new songs live in 2007, including "Next Stop Atro City", "The Dead", "Weapon" and "For He's a Jolly Good Felon". The band recorded demo tracks in then-drummer
Ilan Rubin
Ilan Rubin (born July 7, 1988) is an American musician, singer, and songwriter. He is known primarily for playing drums with bands such as Nine Inch Nails, Paramore, and Angels & Airwaves. In 2008 he formed The New Regime, in which he sings and ...
's garage in
San Diego
San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...
, and album sessions with producer
John Feldmann
John Feldmann (born June 29, 1967) is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. He serves as the lead singer/guitarist of the band Goldfinger.
Early life
Feldmann grew up in Saratoga, California. He started writing song ...
in Foxy Studios,
Bel Air in July. A demo of "Weapon" was played on
BBC Radio 1
BBC Radio 1 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. It specialises in modern popular music and current chart hits throughout the day. The station provides alternative genres at night, including electronica, dance, ...
's Rock Show in August 2007, and subsequently revealed by the band to have been rejected from the album. However, a different version of this track was later released as a hidden track on the band's fifth and final studio album,
Weapons
A weapon, arm or armament is any implement or device that can be used to deter, threaten, inflict physical damage, harm, or kill. Weapons are used to increase the efficacy and efficiency of activities such as hunting, crime, law enforcement, s ...
. In January 2008,
Kerrang!
''Kerrang!'' is a British weekly magazine devoted to rock, punk and heavy metal music, currently published by Wasted Talent (the same company that owns electronic music publication ''Mixmag''). It was first published on 6 June 1981 as a one- ...
magazine revealed six new song titles, including one ("Save Yourself"), which later appeared as a bonus track on ''Weapons'', and four ("Credible vs Incredible", "The Mourning Reign", "What Seems to Be the Problem Officer?" and "She's with the Banned") that have not been mentioned since.
Although the band had recorded a full album's worth of material in LA, reportedly spending around $500,000, they felt that the resultant recordings were too "slick and shiny", featuring layers of
Pro Tools
Pro Tools is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed and released by Avid Technology (formerly Digidesign) for Microsoft Windows and macOS. It is used for music creation and production, sound for picture (sound design, audio post-productio ...
and even trumpets.
Dissatisfied with this, the recordings were scrapped and the band approached
Bob Rock
Robert Jens Rock (born April 19, 1954) is a Canadian record producer, sound engineer and musician, best known for producing rock bands and music artists such as Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, The Tragically Hip, the Cult, 31 ...
(producer of ''Liberation Transmission'') to produce the album in March 2008.
However, Rock's hectic and unpredictable schedule, coupled with his scepticism that the songs were good enough to work on full-time,
meant that they were not able to record with him until April
or June 2009.
The band also left their US record label,
Columbia, also unconvinced of the quality of the new material,
around this time, with
Sony Music Entertainment
Sony Music Entertainment (SME), also known as simply Sony Music, is an American multinational music company. Being owned by the parent conglomerate Sony Group Corporation, it is part of the Sony Music Group, which is owned by Sony Entertainment ...
taking over their actions in the American market.
Faced with such adversity, Lostprophets decided to take control of the record back, with bassist Stuart Richardson (who had produced the band's demo EPs in the late 90s
and the self-titled debut album for
Attack! Attack! earlier in 2008) leading the production alongside Justin Hopfer for the album.
They continued writing in 2008, debuting eventual first single "It's Not the End of the World, But I Can See It from Here" (a title that had been mentioned since August 2007,
having been one of the first songs written for the new album in 2006) and "Streets of Nowhere"
live, as well as a new version of "Next Stop Atro City".
In November 2008, Lostprophets finally began the sessions for what would become ''The Betrayed''. Following pre-production in
Alabama
(We dare defend our rights)
, anthem = "Alabama (state song), Alabama"
, image_map = Alabama in United States.svg
, seat = Montgomery, Alabama, Montgomery
, LargestCity = Huntsville, Alabama, Huntsville
, LargestCounty = Baldwin County, Al ...
the band moved on to
Sunset Sound
Sunset, also known as sundown, is the daily disappearance of the Sun below the horizon due to Earth's rotation. As viewed from everywhere on Earth (except the North and South poles), the equinox Sun sets due west at the moment of both the spring ...
,
Kingsize Soundlabs
Kingsize Soundlabs are three recording studios in Los Angeles County, California, run by record producer Dave Trumfio.
Background
Located in the Silverlake, Glassell Park, and Atwater Village areas of Los Angeles. The Glassell Park studio i ...
and Richardson's home,
all in Los Angeles. The band enjoyed the freedom self-production gave them, feeling that the album is "totally representative" of them rather than being "diluted with someone else's vision".
Rubin was invited by
Trent Reznor
Michael Trent Reznor (born May 17, 1965) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and composer. He serves as the lead vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and principal songwriter of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, wh ...
to join the touring band for
Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated as NIN and stylized as NIИ, is an American industrial rock band formed in Cleveland in 1988. Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Trent Reznor was the only permanent member of the band ...
in November 2008, and so left Lostprophets but not before tracking all of the drums and helping pen some of the music for the album. Former
Beat Union
Beat Union was a pop-punk band from Birmingham, Bromsgrove and Redditch, United Kingdom. They were formerly known as Shortcut to Newark. The group has garnered comparisons to Elvis Costello and The Jam, as well as pop punk groups like Green ...
drummer Luke Johnson joined Lostprophets around June 2009,
has filmed the videos for the album's first two singles and has played live with the band since late August. The album recordings were announced to be completed via a MySpace blog on 31 March 2009, with interludes recorded around May. In August 2009, "If It Wasn't for Hate We'd Be Dead by Now" followed by "Dstryr/Dstryr" and "Where We Belong" were played live for the first time.
Release history
Due to the issues the band faced whilst making the album, its release was delayed many times. Initially the band wished for a quick-follow up to ''Liberation Transmission'', hoping to release the album before the end of 2007.
The band soon revised this timeframe, hoping to release a single in Autumn 2007 and the album as soon as possible afterwards.
Before the Feldmann sessions were scrapped, the release was set for mid-2008.
With the second attempt at recording underway in late 2008, the band planned to release a single in April and the album in June 2009.
In May 2009 a YouTube blog reported the release to be August or September of that year.
Stuart Richardson announced via Twitter that the album was totally finished on 26 July 2009. The website for the magazine
Rock Sound
''Rock Sound'' is a British magazine that covers rock music. The magazine aims at being more "underground" and less commercial, while also giving coverage to better-known acts. It generally focuses on pop punk, post-hardcore, metalcore, punk, e ...
subsequently revealed that the album had been delayed once more to early 2010, and that the first single is "It's Not the End of the World, But I Can See It from Here", due for release in October 2009. The title and several tracks were revealed in 5 August issue of
Kerrang!
''Kerrang!'' is a British weekly magazine devoted to rock, punk and heavy metal music, currently published by Wasted Talent (the same company that owns electronic music publication ''Mixmag''). It was first published on 6 June 1981 as a one- ...
magazine.
"It's Not the End of the World" was played for the first time on
Zane Lowe
Alexander Zane Reid Lowe (born 7 August 1973) is a New Zealand radio DJ, live DJ, record producer, and television presenter.
After an early career in music creation, production and DJing, he moved to the UK in 1997. He came to prominence thro ...
's
BBC Radio 1
BBC Radio 1 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. It specialises in modern popular music and current chart hits throughout the day. The station provides alternative genres at night, including electronica, dance, ...
show on 19 August, where the release date was mentioned on 12 October. This was later confirmed on the band's website. On 7 October 2009, an email from the band's mailing list stated the album is to be released on 18 January 2010, and on 9 November
XFM and
BBC Radio 1
BBC Radio 1 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. It specialises in modern popular music and current chart hits throughout the day. The station provides alternative genres at night, including electronica, dance, ...
confirmed the second single as "
Where We Belong", to be released a fortnight prior to the album. The third single from the album was "
For He's a Jolly Good Felon", which was released on 12 April 2010.
Reception
The album received generally positive reviews from music critics.
At
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
, which assigns a
normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an
average
In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...
score of 67, based on 10 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews".
Influences and themes
Since the album was first talked about in November 2006,
Lostprophets have stated numerous times that the album would be "darker", "more apocalyptic", "grittier" and lyrically less optimistic and more cynical than their previous efforts.
In August 2009, Stuart Richardson stated that this thematic change had been nurtured by the subsequent difficulties with "behind the scenes bullshit".
Both Richardson and fellow band members Jamie Oliver and
Mike Lewis stated that the new album would draw upon elements from across the band's three previous albums.
Oliver considers the lyrical content of the album the main source of the "dark element",
with vocalist and lyricist
Ian Watkins having previously called the lyrics "nasty" and "horrible", displaying a "more honest" representation of his own character.
Despite this, the album has still been described as "poppy"
and "catchy",
with the "massive hooks" the band are known for remaining.
Like ''
The Fake Sound of Progress
''The Fake Sound of Progress'' (stylized as ''thefakesoundofprogress'') is the debut studio album by the Welsh rock band Lostprophets, originally released on 27 November 2000 through Visible Noise. The album would be released in 2001 by Columb ...
'' and ''
Start Something
''Start Something'' is the second studio album by the Welsh rock band Lostprophets, released on 2 February 2004 through Visible Noise in the United Kingdom and South Korea. The album was released internationally on 5 February 2004. The band bega ...
'' before it, ''The Betrayed'' features interludes between tracks. Several of the new songs performed live incorporated group singalong elements, with the audience encouraged to join in at live shows. "For He's a Jolly Good Felon" and "Streets of Nowhere" are "
Motown
Motown Records is an American record label owned by the Universal Music Group. It was founded by Berry Gordy Jr. as Tamla Records on June 7, 1958, and incorporated as Motown Record Corporation on April 14, 1960. Its name, a portmanteau of ''moto ...
-y,
mod
Mod, MOD or mods may refer to:
Places
* Modesto City–County Airport, Stanislaus County, California, US
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* Mods (band), a Norwegian rock band
* M.O.D. (Method of Destruction), a band from New York City, US ...
type songs", a style the band previously explored in "
Can't Catch Tomorrow (Good Shoes Won't Save You This Time)
"Can't Catch Tomorrow (Good Shoes Won't Save You This Time)" is the third single from the album ''Liberation Transmission'', the third studio album by Welsh band Lostprophets. It entered the UK singles chart at 35, the lowest position yet for a s ...
".
Inspiration for the new record has also been drawn from
Faith No More
Faith No More is an American rock band from San Francisco, California, formed in 1979. Before settling on the current name in July 1983, the band performed under the names Sharp Young Men and later Faith No Man. Bassist Billy Gould, keyboardist/r ...
and
Refused
Refused (also known as the Refused) is a Swedish hardcore punk band originating from Umeå and formed in 1991. Refused is composed of vocalist Dennis Lyxzén, guitarist Kristofer Steen, drummer David Sandström, and bassist Magnus Flagge. Guit ...
, bands that inspired Lostprophets in the early days of their career.
Similar to previous Lostprophets albums, the closing track uses instrumentation "a little different" to the band's usual style.
Track listing
All lyrics written by
Ian Watkins. All music composed by Lostprophets, except "", written by Lostprophets and Ilan Rubin, "Sunshine", written by Lostprophets and Aled Phillips.
Personnel
Credits for ''The Betrayed'' adapted from liner notes.
;Lostprophets
*
Ian Watkins –
lead vocals
The lead vocalist in popular music is typically the member of a group or band whose voice is the most prominent melody in a performance where multiple voices may be heard. The lead singer sets their voice against the accompaniment parts of t ...
,
artwork
A work of art, artwork, art piece, piece of art or art object is an artistic creation of aesthetic value. Except for "work of art", which may be used of any work regarded as art in its widest sense, including works from literature ...
,
layout
Layout may refer to:
* Page layout, the arrangement of visual elements on a page
** Comprehensive layout (comp), a proposed page layout presented by a designer to their client
* Layout (computing), the process of calculating the position of obje ...
*
Lee Gaze
Lee James Gaze (born 21 May 1975 in Pontypridd, Wales) is a Welsh musician. He is the lead guitarist, and also one of the founding members, of the Welsh/American alternative rock band No Devotion and previously a member of the Welsh rock band L ...
–
lead guitar
Lead guitar (also known as solo guitar) is a musical part for a guitar in which the guitarist plays melody lines, instrumental fill passages, guitar solos, and occasionally, some riffs and chords within a song structure. The lead is the featur ...
*
Mike Lewis –
rhythm guitar
In music performances, rhythm guitar is a technique and role that performs a combination of two functions: to provide all or part of the rhythmic pulse in conjunction with other instruments from the rhythm section (e.g., drum kit, bass guitar ...
*
Stuart Richardson
Stuart Richardson (born 15 August 1973) is a Welsh musician. He is the bassist for the rock band No Devotion, formed by former members of Lostprophets and Geoff Rickly of Thursday. He is also the touring bassist for Thursday.
Career
Richardson ...
–
bass guitar
The bass guitar, electric bass or simply bass (), is the lowest-pitched member of the string family. It is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric or an acoustic guitar, but with a longer neck and ...
,
production
Production may refer to:
Economics and business
* Production (economics)
* Production, the act of manufacturing goods
* Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services)
* Production as a stati ...
,
recording
A record, recording or records may refer to:
An item or collection of data Computing
* Record (computer science), a data structure
** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity
** Boot sector or boot record, ...
,
mixing
*
Jamie Oliver
James Trevor Oliver MBE OSI (born 27 May 1975) is an English chef, restaurateur and cookbook author. He is known for his casual approach to cuisine, which has led him to front numerous television shows and open many restaurants.
Oliver reache ...
–
piano
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...
,
keyboard
Keyboard may refer to:
Text input
* Keyboard, part of a typewriter
* Computer keyboard
** Keyboard layout, the software control of computer keyboards and their mapping
** Keyboard technology, computer keyboard hardware and firmware
Music
* Musi ...
,
samples,
vocals
Singing is the act of creating musical sounds with the voice. A person who sings is called a singer, artist or vocalist (in jazz and/or popular music). Singers perform music (arias, recitatives, songs, etc.) that can be sung with or without ...
;Additional musicians
*
Aled Phillips – additional writing on "Sunshine"
*
Ilan Rubin
Ilan Rubin (born July 7, 1988) is an American musician, singer, and songwriter. He is known primarily for playing drums with bands such as Nine Inch Nails, Paramore, and Angels & Airwaves. In 2008 he formed The New Regime, in which he sings and ...
–
drums
A drum kit (also called a drum set, trap set, or simply drums) is a collection of drums, cymbals, and other Percussion instrument, auxiliary percussion instruments set up to be played by one person. The player (drummer) typically holds a pair o ...
,
percussion
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Exc ...
; additional writing on ""
;Production
* Fred Archambault – additional
engineering
Engineering is the use of scientific method, scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad rang ...
* Justin Hopfer – production, recording, mixing
*
Stephen Marcussen
Stephen Marcussen is the founder and chief mastering engineer at Marcussen Mastering in Hollywood, California, United States. He has been mastering music since 1979.
Biography
Marcussen's introduction to music recording happened in 1976 when, at ...
–
mastering
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
References
External links
''The Betrayed''at YouTube (streamed copy where licensed)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Betrayed, The
Lostprophets albums
2010 albums
Visible Noise albums
Albums recorded at Kingsize Soundlabs