Prophets of Rage, the new supergroup featuring Rage Against The Machine members Tom Morello, Tim Commerford, and Brad Wilk, along with Chuck D (Public Enemy) and B-Real (Cypress Hill), are hitting the studio today for the first time. Morello, Commerford, and Wilk last recorded album was Audioslave’s Revelations a decade ago in 2006. While Prophets of Rage are recording original material, a full album is not quite in the works yet. Tom Morello tells Billboard that the band is recording “The Party’s Over,” which recently was debuted live.
“Yeah, there’s other stuff bubbling,” he says. “But no one’s quit their day jobs. Public Enemy is on tour right now. Cypress Hill is on tour right now. Timmy’s WAKRAT band is rehearsing. I’m working on a new record. So we had this kind of initial fireball of activity, and now we’re doing some recording and we’re gearing up for our summer tour.”
“The goal is a simple one: The music has to be devastating,” Morello explains. “In all these interviews we talk a lot about the politics, but the cornerstone is that the music has to be devastating and we have to not just be competitive with our legacies, but in 2016, it has to be something that goes beyond that and is very authentic, unapologetic and contemporary.”
“When we got in the room, it was like, ‘Well, hold on, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We have to figure out what this band’s chemistry is to be great. How do we win with this team on the field?’ And that took awhile to figure out,” Morello recalls. “I would say that it really came together a couple days before the Whisky show [May 31], where it was like, ‘Oh, sh–, that’s what Prophets of Rage is going to sound like!’ And it’s still a process. I always look at it like it’s never done and will continue to be refined as we go along.”
