There’s no such thing as half measures with grandson. Equal parts political agitator, genre-wrecking ball, and vulnerable storyteller, he’s built a reputation on records that confront power while refusing to sand down their rough edges. Now, with the release of his third album INERTIA, he’s pushing further than ever — angrier, louder, sharper, and more personal.
Over the course of ten songs, grandson grapples with corrupt industry figures, the weaponization of technology, endless doomscrolling, systemic violence, and his own breaking points — balancing raw confession with headbanging catharsis. It’s the sound of an artist not just surviving upheaval but weaponizing it into riffs, hooks, and rallying cries.
In his own words — sleep-deprived, unfiltered, and fired up — grandson walks us through INERTIA track by track.
WASSUP y’all. Granny here. It’s the release week of my third album, I’m on no fucking sleep, giving you a real ass song-by-song breakdown for INERTIA. Let’s get into it.
“BURY YOU“
Kicking shit off! I started with Bury You for a couple of reasons. 1 obvious one was that guitar intro – it just felt like the right way to introduce a riffy fucking record like this, some big emphatic hits, no computer programming, just a heavy ass rock band sound and a gnarly chugging locomotive of pissed off energy hitting your headphones and stages around the world. But it’s also a proper place to reintroduce myself because of the subject matter.
As my second record came out, I found out I had someone close to me in my life and music career up to some no good, seedy, music executive me too type shit. It led me down a long and dark period of discovery and transition through the ILYIT tour, it took the better part of the past 2 years to sort out, thanks to a few brave women who spoke up, and this album represents the culmination of finally getting out of that place – that disgusting feeling of realizing you’ve been ignorant and let your hands off the wheel, let a man use your success to lure in hopeful artists to take advantage of them, and then taking the power back into your hands and putting him where he belongs, in the rearview fucking mirror. I look forward to that person hearing this song and hearing this record, my strongest and most realized version of who I am yet.
“AUTONOMOUS DELIVERY ROBOT“
This felt like a proper pace to pick the heart rate up with, roll right into track 2 with a thrash metal takedown of AI, automated industry, technology being used to destroy us for the concentration of wealth and power. While I was writing this album in West Los Angeles, I started seeing these little fucking robots delivering people’s lunches to work when I’d be taking a break from the studio, and they just… Pissed me off. I hate how they take up space on the sidewalk, how they are given human names and cute little blinking eyes, to mask their insidious purpose of taking a job away from an actual human being.
And of course, how these seemingly innocent applications of facial recognition technology or AI then get used to train robots for military and police purposes. I sang that bridge in one breath, by the way. If anybody can sing this in one breath with me at the concert, I will give them a cookie. This was the last song I wrote for INERTIA. Tobias Kelly drummed out of his absolute mind on this song.
“BRAINROT“
This song came to me from a night scrolling on TikTok. It was kind of like a modern nu metal take on the Beatles A Day in the Life or something. Just the life and times. The normalization of the literal worst things you’ve ever seen being sandwiched between sports highlights and thirst traps and cute dog videos and political theory and vintage concert footage and then suddenly its like the war in Ukraine, the ongoing genocide in Palestine, climate disasters, police brutality, ICE raids, mass shootings, racist americans yelling slurs out of their window at the grocery store parking lot.
And it’s all interconnected, of course. Viewing these issues as separate issues, to be dealt with in separate ways by separate people, serves to further perpetuate social isolation, silo us from one another. It was when Martin Luther King Jr. began to speak to economic liberation, when the black panther party called for poor and working-class Americans of ALL races to band together, that they were assassinated. The overlapping disaster, the intersectional violence.
“SELF IMMOLATION“
RIP Aaron Bushnell! RIP ALL THOSE WHO HAVE PERISHED FROM VIETNAM TO CHINA TO AMERICA AND BEYOND TO DRAW ATTENTION TO THE PERSECUTION OF THE PEOPLE! END THE BLOODSHED IN GAZA. They responded to a man setting himself on fire by pulling their gun out on him. If that isn’t a perfect encapsulation of America at this moment, I don’t know what is. Shouts out to DJ JG on the scratching, the neighbourhood kids, Mike Crossey produced this song with so much clarity and restraint.
“YOU MADE ME THIS WAY“
This was like the deepest and most granular I went into a theme I had tried to tackle before- what makes a person reach their breaking point. The lyrics just sorta poured out of me on night on tour. I wanted that detail- the isolation of only having friends on the internet, divorce rates skyrocketing, the hypocrisy of a country claiming to be “pro life” and telling you as soon as you exit your mother’s uterus that you are on your own. Just humanizing the bad guys in our collective consciousness to understand that you’ll never uproot the epidemic of violence in our society by treating these as singular instances of evil people doing bad things. Life isn’t that simple.
This was meant to be the last song on the record, but we bumped it up because I just fucking loved it and didn’t want to bury it. Definitely had some old Foo Fighters or something on in the car on my way to the studio when we wrote that hook. Loved getting quiet on the third verse. This whole album, I really wanted to push myself on my vocal delivery and be as deliberate and expressive as possible with the song dynamics, and keeping a long verse interesting is always a fun challenge. Ran out of breath on one take as I sang the ending of this song and kept it in for the vulnerability. I’m so proud of this song. Thank you, Andrew, thank you, Max.
“LITTLE WHITE LIES“
We had the verses to this song forever and couldn’t crack the hook. Just bare truths about white nationalism and the plague of racism embedded in our roots. At the time, Joe Biden was in office, and my frustration with the futility of their reelection campaign brought that second verse out of me. like… fuck. Just meet this moment and fight, show people the system is rigged and take demonstrative steps to build back some faith in the left. But of course, that didn’t happen in a way people connected with, and here we are.
Channelled a bit of Limp Bizkit with the sarcasm in the bridge. Can’t wait to shout this live. Shouts out to Verde and Amon for singing the chorus with me, wanted another voice on there, fearless poets, other perspectives on this one to bring that anger out. Love the little catch in the final hook, shouts out to Leo for cooking that little extra detail up on the guitar at the end. It was a family affair, this whole album process.
“GOD IS AN ANIMAL“
I wrote this song back in 2018 or 2019 with Kevin Hissink; we had a whole concept EP lined up around it that never found its home. Maybe one day we’ll drop it. It was the hardest song in the vault for sooo long, I held onto this so close to my heart and just told myself one day it’ll be ready, one day, and to be honest, I’m not sure that day ever came, except that this album just felt so full of that anger, it felt like it could live inside these songs, and I was ready to untether myself from these old demos, I started to feel like holding back some of my best work was based out of fear instead of being from a place of abundance. Gotta let it flow. Trust there is more coming. So we put it on here and it’s a huge relief to have it be in the hands of listeners now.
“BELLS OF WAR“
I’m not sure what you’d call this; it is kind of an homage to Bad Brains, to Turnstile, to the hardcore scene that some of the most fearless political solidarity is born in, and then the ending is like 2005 Wolf Mother or something. I tried another version of this song, and it wasn’t clicking, and then Leo and Max and Andrew, who I wrote most of the record with, came in and just kinda pulled this out of thin air around a riff I started playing. Some of the best energy in the writing room I’ve ever felt, 100 songs into my career.
“WHO’S THE ENEMY“
Mannn shouts out Bob Vylan, GIVE THESE GUYS THEIR VISAS SO WE CAN ROCK THESE SHOWS TOGETHER!!! Just a rewriting of the narrative, a condemnation of corporate journalism, the way the NYT and other mainstream outlets covered Gaza, the “war on drugs”, the attacks on trans people, all just completely lacking humanity or empathy or responsibility. The Who’s the enemy line came from a book I was reading called Dispatches by Michael Herr, an incredible and honest piece of journalism from the ground in Vietnam, as soldiers were becoming disillusioned and defecting. Of course, it was that honest and courageous journalism that played such a large part in ultimately ending the war in Vietnam. Which is why journalism is under attack from Trump and Netanyahu, and all these other war mongers.
“PULL THE TRIGGER“
Last but not least!!! America’s obsession with violence. My obsession with violence. The voyeurism, the carnage. The infamy and notoriety that anonymous hurting people so crave. Kind of Nirvana cheerleader smells like teen spirit music video inspired, with a weird Pinegrove style math rock super quiet small intimate ending. And I wanted to end with one small little electronic produced hip hop moment in verse 2 as a message to my day one fans- I remember, I didn’t forget you. Kind of inspired by Suicide Boys, Lil Peep, in that moment. It’s all over the place. It sounds all over the place! But it’s my weird fucked up mish mash that makes me me. And I’m so grateful to Mike Crossey for producing this album, Max and Leo and Andrew and Tobias and Alex and JG and all the musicians that helped me tell these stories. It was a pleasure to burn.
