Huntington, West Virginia: Massing has dropped their first single of 2026 and it’s one you have to listen to. The track is a jarring, infectious exploration of emotional atrophy, anchored by a riff that has been simmering in the band’s collective subconscious for over half a decade. “Chemicals” isn’t just a song about burnout; it’s a song about the fear that your “special sauce” might have been neutralized by the very things meant to keep you sane. It’s a rare, slow-burn release for a band known for rapid fire output, capturing a five-year journey from the lingering anxieties of adolescent medication to the “fourth-wall-breaking” realization that sometimes, the only way to finish a song is to start heckling it from the inside.
Featuring a sonic palette that trades blows between Queens of the Stone Age muscle and a surprising Black Keys melodic sensibility; the single finds the band navigating the “spot in between two parts” of themselves. The result is a work that is as mentally challenging as it is sonically massive.
We sat down with Robb and Heath to talk about the long road to “Chemicals,” and why the best way to finish a song is sometimes to tell it to get to the point.
BB: The opening lines about chemicals losing their potency suggest a certain emotional numbness or burnout. Was this song born out of a specific moment of feeling “tapped out,” or is it more of a commentary on the general state of being a creative in 2026?
HEATH: This song is kind of a weird one, because it was written very slowly in different phases over the course of 5 or 6 years, whereas most of our songs have been written pretty rapidly. Those were the first lyrics of this song I had written, and even then I was recalling a period of time years ago in high school when I had been put on medication that eventually caused me to feel like I couldn’t access creativity or emotion the same way I used to. I had been wondering if even long after, it had some sort of irreversible, residual effect on me that I’d never know about. It’s probably an irrational fear, but it’s something I can’t help but think about sometimes. The “being a creative in 2026” thing is a cool interpretation, and I don’t want to shit on anyone’s experience or prevent them from getting something different out of the song by being like “No, THIS is what the song’s ACTUALLY about.” so I guess I hope readers have listened to the song and have taken their own meaning from it before they read this.
*Also, I should probably throw out there that this isn’t us promoting not taking your medicine. This song is more of just a rambling of out loud intrusive thoughts.
BB: In the second verse, you refer to being “made so safe and sound” as a bad thing. There’s a tension there between stability and artistic stagnation. Do you feel like comfort is the enemy of your songwriting?
HEATH: Yeah, that’s kinda going back to what I said earlier: This idea that something changed irreversibly that might have taken away some of your special sauce. And this sort of irritation of not even being able to know. The song is written from that sort of naive, angry voice that’s irritated with the fact that you can’t ever know what you would be like today if that one thing hadn’t happened to you then. As far as “comfort being the enemy of songwriting” goes, I definitely used to feel that way. When I was in college, single, serving tables, bartending, staying out until 3 or 4am every night, and definitely doing a lot of self-destruction, that’s when I felt like I was in peak creative mode. But that’s probably more credited to the fact that I had less responsibility and more time to express myself creatively. That’s also touched on a bit in the song.
Now that I’m in a more stable chapter of life, I can say there’s a little bit of a steep on-ramp at first where songwriting feels a little more difficult, making it easy to look at your newfound comfort as an obstacle. But I think it’s really just because you’re not writing about the same old shit from the same old perspective anymore. For me personally, after some time, I feel just as much now like we’re writing our best songs as I did back then. Maybe we’re just overly confident in ourselves, though.
BB: The chorus centers on the struggle of “keeping your head down” versus “keeping your chin up.” That search for the “spot in between the two worst parts of me” is heavy. Musically, how did you try to mirror that feeling of being stuck in a mental limbo?
ROBB: I think musically, there’s a push and pull of momentum throughout the entire song that resembles that kind of torn emotion. It repeats this steady-but-restrained beat just to explode into some kind of big angry riff in cycles, taking different forms between the verses, chorus, and the bridge. Although Heath wrote the lyrics after the music was laid down, I do find that musical tension and release reflective of the mental limbo described in the lyrics.
BB: The voiceover before the bridge by Tim Ir acts as an entrance ramp to the bridge. It’s humorously self-deprecating and plays off some long running gags within the Massing camp. What was the inspiration for this comedic break in the song?
ROBB: That was the only section Heath didn’t write lyrics for on his first pass after the music was fleshed out, and we saw it as an opportunity to experiment with a vocal part that wasn’t necessarily melodic. One of us threw out the idea of a spoken word section and I think we both laughed, and once we started fleshing the idea out, it became obvious that it should be Tim Irr reading a goofy newscast about us. We’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with Tim a handful of times on various things (mostly stupid Massing skits that he graciously agrees to appear in) and he always overdelivers. We thought it made sense and would be a nice easter egg to take it a step further and actually put him in a song.
HEATH: Tim rules.
BB:The bridge takes a sudden turn, demanding the song “get to the good shit” and “get to the meat.” It almost feels like the song is becoming self-aware and critiquing itself in real time. What influenced that decision to break the fourth wall mid track?
HEATH: At this point in the songwriting process, we needed a bridge. I didn’t really know how to progress forward from what I had written throughout the rest of the song years beforehand. So I’m reading the lyrics and I’m asking myself, “What am I even talking about here? What’s the point of all this?” So I sort of ended up critiquing the whole point of the song from that perspective and made that into the first half of the bridge. The second half is almost more meta in the sense that I’m telling myself to basically hurry up and finish writing it, and sort of telling Massing from the perspective of the listener to get on with it and get back to the chorus. Kind of a rare instance of doing the first thing that comes to mind and it actually working.
BB: How much of the “Chemicals” sound is a product of the WV environment versus the outside alternative or post-punk influences you guys are pulling from right now? And who are some of those influences?
HEATH: I think being influenced by West Virginia is something that just happens when you’re from here, and you shouldn’t consciously try to insert that influence. You should take pride in whatever form WV winds up taking in your work, but when you try to force it, I feel like it just comes off heavy handed. I’m confident that we sound like we’re from West Virginia, but I also don’t know what the active ingredient is. I don’t think we’re really “doing the West Virginia thing,” if you know what I mean. So with all that being said, I’m not sure I can really point a finger at what part of, or how much of the song is influenced by West Virginia. It’s definitely in there though.
ROBB: Heath and I had been kicking around that first riff for a long time, but once we started playing it with the rest of the band, it feels like some Queens of the Stone Age influence might have crept in, along with maybe a little more Fall Out Boy than we usually tap into. Jeff’s heavy drumming definitely informed the way we put the rest of the song together, and I think once we got the chorus riff figured out, we were all able to see where the song was headed.
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Listen to “Chemicals” HERE
