Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton just released his highly anticipated new solo album — his first — Anesthetic via Spinefarm Records. The album sees the riff-master exploring genres outside metal and teaming with a variety of famous friends, including members of Megadeth, Alice in Chains, Trivium, Arch Enemy, Papa Roach and many more. The highest profile cameo, however, comes from late Linkin Park vocalist Chester Bennington, who collaborated with Morton on the song “Cross Off” not long before the singer’s death by suicide in July 2017. The composition was mostly written before Bennington came on, but he contributed his own ideas and lyrics, which are reflected in the final product, one of the heavier cuts on the record and one of the heaviest offering of the vocalist’s career.
Today, Morton premiered a music video for the song, and fittingly, it addresses the idea of invisible personal demons and how hard they can be to defeat and how hard they can be to miss for those who aren’t interacting directly with them. The cinematic visual, which oddly recalls the video for Shawn Mendes’ pop hit “Stitches,” portrays a young man battling an unseen malevolent force in a parking garage and eventually meeting his demise — an oblivious security guard doesn’t even notice what it is going on — before an eerie lookalike emerges from the trunk of his car. The narrative footage is intercut with clips of Morton and his band playing live, the mic for a lead singer conspicuously unmanned, underlining Bennington’s absence. Check out the powerful video below.
