A fan shared a YouTube comment that stated, “Who knew Rage Against The Machine had anything to do with social justice? Now I hate them.” The fan asked Morello, “How often does this happen.”
Morello responded, “You’d be shocked how often.”
In a new Relix interview, Morello calls his new record The Atlas Underground a “fully curated work,” and he already had an unflinching “sonic and thematic vision” for the project from its earliest stages. Like the titular Atlas, who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, Morello gave himself an almost impossible task. He wanted to create an entirely new genre of rock-and-roll—a sound that “combines Marshall Stack fury with all the electronic wizardry of today and then meshes it with a wide variety of like-minded artists of different genres.”
The key was to find the right cast to bring it to life. “It started with the EDM guys,” Morello explains. “Knife Party and Bassnectar and Pretty Lights and Baauer and Steve Aoki. The one thing they all have in common, I was surprised to find, is that they were all Rage Against the Machine fans. And I heard it in their work. Hints of it—in the tension and the release, the huge drops and sometimes the aggressiveness of the beat—and I thought, ‘Well what if we just replace some of your synthesizers with my electric guitar? We might be onto something.’”
You’d be shocked how often. https://t.co/9dIg9CWLud
— Tom Morello (@tmorello) March 5, 2019
@tmorello how often does this happen? (😂) pic.twitter.com/bvzifhkN5Q
— Collin Sullivan (@_5u11y) March 5, 2019
