The Act Tracklist
The Act is the tenth record, and seventh LP, by Christian metal band The Devil Wears Prada. The album peaked at No. 70 on the Billboard 200 the week it was released, making it the group’s first album to hit the charts. Originally teased through Twitter on October 2, 2019, the album was preceded by three singles (“Lines of Your Hands,” “Please Say No,” and “Chemical”) in the weeks leading up to the release.
The cover artwork was designed to depict Hell, and is one of the most unique album’s of the band’s discography. In every interview, the frontman Mike Hranica has said the album is a departure from the band’s usual work, and is meant for listeners to branch out and think. In an October 2019 interview with RockSound, a week after the announcement of the record, Hranica explained the project’s core concept:
‘The Act’ as a title is the part that you can interpret as you see fit. That’s what drew me in – the act can be sex, or a crime, or whatever action or exercise you want. I wanted that involvement between the artist and the listener where when given specific songs, the listener mold it as they please.
The Act has only one feature with Sierra Kay lending her soft vocals to the hardcore album.
“The Act” Q&A
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What has the artist said about the album?
We wanted to do something that actually tests the boundaries, […] You don’t see that in rock, and there’s so little invention in rock these days. With Roots Above to look at it from that perspective was us moving from screamo to metalcore. That was the objective of that record, according to my memory at least. That’s not so much what The Act is. […] I think there are safer options as far as what we could have done with our seventh record, […] We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to do something that tries to avoid the tiredness and nail it in. Being complacent, which I think would have been making the ‘safer’ record, is something that we deeply look to avoid, and by making a record that we think is going to try people or catch them off guard is something we intentionally signed up for. […] To me, The Act feels all-encompassing, and the record doesn’t have commonalities between the songs, so I wanted something that did capture everything, […] It’s also kind of abstract in that The Act refers to anything. It could be referred to as a crime or a sexual act or whatever it might be, so I thought it sucked up all of the songs well. A part of the record that I started with is the idea of being fake, both in a cultural and political sense that we deal with on a daily basis here in 2019. The songs didn’t take that much of a role until they went from the actor to the act. […] Musically speaking, Jon and Kyle wrote the album, so their communication and the way they work together is seamless and fluent, […] We came up with many more songs than we ever have before and scratched a ton of them. It’s been a long time coming as far as [Gering] at the reins as the record’s formal producer. He steered this ship 110% in terms of working with me, Kyle and the rest of the band.
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What artists did the band draw inspiration from for the album?
Mike Hranica cites Chelsea Wolfe as an inspiration on the new album during an interview with Revolver Magazine in October 2019:
Musically, and it feels silly to say this, but the piece that came out that we were all — at least Jon, Kyle and I — really enjoyed collectively was Hiss Spun from Chelsea Wolfe. Usually Jon, Kyle and I are on different planets as far as what we like to listen to ourselves recreationally, [but] there was a lot in that record that checked a lot of boxes for us, particularly in moodiness.
