Whitechapel Tickets

Whitechapel, who formed in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2006, has seen the core lineup—vocalist Phill Bozeman; guitarists Ben Savage, Zach Householder and Alex Wade; bassist Gabe Crisp—intact since 2007, with the exception of the drummer Brandon Zackey, who has been playing with the band since 2022. While Hymns in Dissonance follows 2021’s Kin chronologically, the new album is actually somewhat of a sequel to This is Exile thematically, the three-word title Hymns in Dissonance representing that correlation.

Whitechapel started writing for the new album at Householder’s studio in June of 2023, following the band’s headlining tour for The Valley. Whitechapel stuck to a strict weekday schedule, the structure allowing formaximum creativity and minimum burnout. Householder produced Hymns in Dissonance, which allowed the musicians to seamlessly switch gears from preproduction to recording the full album without skipping a beat.The guitarist shadowed producer Mark Lewis a lot over the last five Whitechapel albums and bringing that influence inside the band is a “full circle moment for Householder and Whitechapel. “It’s cool that we can be self-sufficient and produce a record of this magnitude ourselves; not a lot of bands can say that.”

Longtime fans will detect hints of the past within the brutality. To wit: the riff-tastic “Hate Cult Ritual” is the only song on the album with Drop A tuning, the tuning the first three Whitechapel albums used. Additionally, the Hymns in Dissonance chapter in Bozeman’s life finds the frontman living through his “past times,” or as he states, “the music that brought me here. Brutal, dark, aggressive, heavy music. Death metal, black metal, speed metal, etc. I truly believe that your roots call you back at some point in your life and this is that point in my life.”

At this stage in the game, the name Whitechapel commands the ultimate respect. Already sitting on one of the most enviable catalogs in contemporary metal, in 2019 they dropped The Valley, highlighting a confident evolution in their sound and standing as a true landmark release that sets a new standard for the genre. With Bozeman exploring childhood trauma on 2019’s The Valley, it was their darkest release to-date. But with its 2021 successor, Kin, the story was darker still