Stray From The Path have been bringing their charged-up hardcore fury and politically outspoken lyricism to the masses for the better part of two decades, aiming to be the kind of band that can be a gateway to both heavy music and radical ideas.

The Long Island, NY hardcore heavyweights, released their cracking new album Euthanasia on Friday via UNFD. The darkest and heaviest work of the band's career, drawing on challenging circumstances to create a record that pulls no punches sonically or lyrically.

Clearly the work of a more weathered and visceral era of Stray From The Path--the tremendous riffs and hip-hop-meets-hardcore vocal cadences are still there, but this time they're accompanied by an apocalyptic mood that draws the listener in and doesn't let go.

Produced by scene luminary Will Putney, (Knocked Loose, Body Count, Every Time I Die) the record reflects the grimmer personal and global circumstances that surrounded and inspired its creation. 

In celebration of Euthanasia's release, we caught up with guitarist Tom Williams who gave us the inside word on five things you may not have known about the creation of Euthanasia.

5 Things You May Not Know About The Making of Euthanasia

They wrote the lyrics together 

"I'll say one thing is that people may or may not know is that we all write the lyrics together. We kind of do it all like a round table and we will just loop songs and sometimes loop parts for hours and just all sit there writing. And sometimes a lot of stuff will be jumbled in together where like a line is my line and one line is, you know, Anthony's line or one line is Drew's line and Will Putney is writing lyrics for us too. So, the five of us all sit in a fucking circle where we all write lyrics together and we make these songs like literally together."

The majority of the album was created via Twitch 

"The majority of this record was made on Twitch between me and Craig because Craig lives in Scotland and I live in the US and we couldn't see each other and him and I are the main songwriters. We would literally get on Twitch and Craig would get on the Stray From The Path Twitch channel and play some drums, make some stuff for me, program it and send it to me. Then I would go on stream, open it up for the first time and listen to it with our viewers and then be like oh that's cool and start jamming with it. We wrote a lot of our songs like that. We wrote Guillotine and Neighborhood Watch that way. A lot of times our people saw us making a song in real time. Even on songs like Guillotine there was even some like fan feedback that ended up going into the song. Someone had an idea for something, and it ended up going into the fucking song"

Stick To Your Guns' frontman delivered a first for the band on Bread and Roses

"Jesse Barnett's part in Bread and Roses is the first time there's ever been clean singing on a Straight From The Path record."

Benno from Veine.FM supplies the turntable scratches heard on Ladder Work

"The DJ turntable scratching in the song Ladder Work is Benno from Veine.FM. He's their sample/DJ, whatever you call It, but he's that's him on there doing that stuff. He took all of the samples from the record and he just kinda made his own thing. So, on the last track in the chorus that's him."

Producer Will Putney's wife's voice is heard on the voicemail message featured in the final track

"On the last track, there’s a phone message saying, ‘like to meet the requirements of Euthanasia, you must have a constant unbearable suffering,’. Anyway, the person who did that was Will Putney's wife, Marissa. It's funny because we found that in a clip of a documentary, I watched about assisted suicide. In that they say to qualify for it, you must meet the requirements and you must be in a constant state of unbearable pain and it's incurable. So, we were trying to capture that, but there was all this ambience and noises behind it that we couldn't put in the song that sounded cool. We just needed a female voice as this clip is so like daunting. So, we were like, let's go ask Marissa then Marissa did it."

Listen to Euthanasia now