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.