Bad Religion talks about politics, other plans for "New Maps of Hell"

Bad Religion recently spoke to Billboard about their freshly released new album, New Maps of Hell. Guitarist, songwriter and co-founder Brett Gurewitz explains that the track "New Dark Ages" was "inspired by the pervasive anti-intellectualism in the U.S., which I guess is personified by the kind of macho religious-ity of George Bush."

He goes on to explain:

If anything, it's given a touch of sadness and a touch of resignation to our reflectiveness as a band. I think maybe now, while we're moving toward the end of Bush's term -- and having all the wreckage that he's created to deal with in his aftermath -- it's made us more sad than angry.

Don't forget, we did a split 7-inch with [activist] Noam Chomsky protesting the first Gulf War, and now we find ourselves back in war," he adds. "It really almost makes you feel hopeless, like that nothing ever changes -- or that things change, but only for the worse.

Brett also revealed that he hoped the record would be a double-disc album, saying:

I had this sort of grand plan for a really interesting record where we would use different kinds of recording techniques," he says. That included "going back to our old style, and actually doing some real garage-y, eight-track stuff like we did in the old days and then mixing that in with modern recording techniques, and having -- dare I say -- a punk-rock 'White Album' kind of thing -- a sonically inconsistent record.