New album, “Our Gods Needs Blood”, out on May 22nd!
Santa Barbara dark-rockers Rival Cults return with Our Gods Need Blood, a towering new chapter that deepens the band’s collision of gothic romanticism, ritual intensity, and riff-driven rock & roll.
Since forming in 2020, Rival Cults have carved out a distinct space within modern gothic rock, pairing commanding baritone vocals and dual-guitar power with themes of transformation, devotion, and spiritual reckoning. Their 2023 debut, Indoctrination, established the blueprint — earning praise for blending classic goth atmosphere with muscular rock energy and emotional urgency while embracing the band’s mission of putting “more rock in our goth.”
Now, Our Gods Need Blood pushes that vision further into something darker, grander, and more ceremonial.
Where earlier material chronicled personal rebirth, Our Gods Need Blood expands outward, confronting the rituals we build around love, faith, desire, and mortality. Songs like Lust embody the album’s darker human core, as Barrington frames it: “Lust is summed up by the line, ‘I don’t need anything from you, I just want it all that’s true’ — or, as Brennus the Gaul said in 390 BC: Vae Victis… ‘Woe to the vanquished.'”
(Photograph by Simona Del Occulto)
