AFI Release New Album 'Silver Bleeds the Black Sun'

10-03-2025

(Orienteer) AFI releases their new album Silver Bleeds the Black Sun... via Run For Cover Records, today. The twelfth album from AFI includes the previously shared singles "Behind the Clock," "Holy Visions" and "Ash Speck in a Green Eye," the last of which arrived earlier this week.

Last month, vocalist Davey Havok sat with the podcast HardLore to discuss the history of the band in a two-part series. In August, AFI graced the cover of Alternative Press where Havok sat with Editor-In-Chief Anna Zanes to discuss the band's tenure, the sonic shift of Silver Bleeds the Black Sun... and who he has been listening to.

For more than three decades, AFI has been in a nearly constant state of reinvention. The band has made it a point to evolve with every album - sometimes dramatically so - never allowing themselves to become too comfortable in one genre or rest on any of their impressive career laurels. It's an approach that has grown their audience but also challenged it with a sonic identity that can shift in wild, unexpected directions. Now with Silver Bleeds the Black Sun..., AFI are once again at the start of an exciting new chapter, only this time they've even managed to surprise themselves.

The goal of Silver Bleeds the Black Sun... was to make an album with a singular mood, something dreamy and ethereal, and the band members found themselves diving headfirst into influences that had always been deeply embedded in AFI's musical core, but now were being brought to the forefront. The result is an album that feels out of time, at once familiar and fresh, drawing on classic sounds and reinterpreting them through a modern lens.

The album is dark and otherworldly, but also grandiose and stately, biting and beautiful in equal measure-in other words, it's very AFI, yet not quite like any version of the band you've ever heard before. Speaking on its significance, Davey shares, "'Silver Bleeds the Black Sun...' is a sonic manifestation of the struggle to reconcile existence in the godless, uncanny dystopia that is modern life."

It's this combination of endless creative daring, deftly wielded influences, and above all else, an unshakeable sense of self that's allowed AFI to stay relevant for more than 30 years, often leading the way through emerging musical moments. From their scrappy roots as a high school hardcore band in the early '90s (Answer That and Stay Fashionable, Very Proud of Ya and Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes), to their dark melodic punk reinvention at the turn of the century (Black Sails in the Sunset and The Art of Drowning), to their crossover into mainstream stardom in the early 2000s (Sing the Sorrow and Decemberunderground) and their years as shapeshifting alternative rock journeymen (Crash Love, Burials, The Blood Album, and Bodies), the band has survived and thrived by staunchly being themselves-no matter what that is. Stream the new album here