“Don’t Get Too Comfortable” is the title of a track appearing halfway through the Sword’s sixth full-length studio album, Used Future, and though the song itself is a hazy, riff-laden jam in which bandleader J.D. Cronise muses about the dystopian future of our increasingly less green planet, it could also be a warning to the group’s longtime fans that this record represents another step forward in the band’s march away from metal.

It’s been a dozen years since the Sword rode in on the doom-cold winds of Age of Winters, the debut album that landed their music in Guitar Hero, their faces on the covers of numerous metal magazines, and the band, eventually, in arenas, heating up the pit for thrash pioneers Metallica. Since then, the Sword have evolved from sci-fi-channeling metalians to hard’n’heavy rockers of the order that walked the earth nearly half a century ago—or, given the speed at which popular culture now metamorphoses, eons ago.

In short, the boys of the nameless decade are now the men of the bleak present, and they no longer have to look to Philip K. Dick to extract—for inspiration and for lyrical content—horrors of the kind now looming on our event horizon. Lyrically, their latest release touches on mortality, loneliness and earth’s expanding desertscape, all in language as colorful and evocative as that of their previous efforts. Musically, it marries blown-out analog synths worthy of John Carpenter or Tangerine Dream with massive Led Zeppelin riffs and scorching, ZZ Top–style licks to yield boulder-heavy hard rockers rich with flange and distortion, interspersed with dreamier, fuzz-toned explorations.

“We finally sound like ourselves,” enthuses guitarist Kyle Shutt, speaking with High Times on the phone from Austin, the band’s hometown, where they

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