Riffology score: 86/100. The fourth Jerry Cantrell solo record arrives with Robert Trujillo and Duff McKagan splitting the bass chair down the middle, Mike Bordin and Gil Sharone taking the drum stool in shifts, and Joe Barresi engineering the whole thing into the kind of room-sized guitar tone Cantrell has been chasing since Dirt. It is the heaviest thing he has put his name to outside Alice in Chains in over twenty years, and it sounds like a man who has run out of patience with anything that is not a riff.
I Want Blood came out on 18 October 2024 on Double J Music, two and a half years after the country-leaning Brighten. Where that 2021 record opened the curtains, this one nails them shut. Nine tracks, forty-six minutes, recorded at Barresi's JHOC studio in Pasadena, mastered by Bob Ludwig, and built around the dual-guitar weight that defined Cantrell's first decade with Layne Staley. Loudwire ranked it the second-best rock album of 2024. Blabbermouth gave it nine out of ten. The point of this review is to work out whether the record earns that, and where in his catalogue it lives now the dust has settled.
The Sound at a Glance
If you have to summarise I Want Blood in one sentence, it is this: Cantrell has made the album that Alice in Chains fans have spent fifteen years quietly hoping he would. It is darker than Brighten, heavier than Degradation Trip, and shorter than both. The riffs sit low in the mix, the vocals are doubled the way they always have been, and the production is the cleanest Barresi has delivered in a while. No frills, no concept, no twenty-minute closer. Just nine songs, all of them written to be played live in front of a wall of half-stacks.
The texture changes more than the tempo does. Vilified opens with a circular minor-key figure that grinds for nearly five minutes. Off the Rails canters in a manner that prompted Blabbermouth to invoke Layne Staley by name. The title track sets up a galloping hook that several reviewers compared to Queens of the Stone Age and the [Foo Fighters](/posts/the-making-of-foo-fighters-by-foo-fighters/) in the same breath. Echoes of Laughter, the one ballad on the record and the only song with a co-writer credit, slows everything to a Pink Floyd crawl before the rhythm section drops back in. Let It Lie shape-shifts mid-song between two different drummers, which is a sentence not many records earn the right to.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Jerry Cantrell |
| Album | I Want Blood |
| Release Date | 18 October 2024 (standard); 31 January 2025 (deluxe vinyl) |
| Label | Double J Music |
| Producer | Joe Barresi; Jerry Cantrell (production, mixing, engineering) |
| Studio | JHOC Studio, Pasadena, California |
| Mastering | Bob Ludwig |
| Genre | Alternative metal, grunge, hard rock, sludge metal |
| Track Count | 9 |
| Total Runtime | 46:06 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 145 |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 99 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | UK Rock and Metal Albums 3; Scottish Albums 21; Swiss Albums 40 |
| Key Singles | Vilified (26 July 2024); Afterglow (6 September 2024) |
| Album Sequence | Fourth solo studio album (after Boggy Depot 1998, Degradation Trip 2002, Brighten 2021) |
Where Cantrell Sat in 2024
By October 2024 Jerry Cantrell had not released an Alice in Chains record in six years. Rainier Fog had landed in 2018 and the band, with William DuVall now established as a full creative partner alongside Cantrell, had toured it and then quietly stepped back. Brighten in 2021 had been Cantrell's pandemic record, written when the touring industry stopped and the studio became the only place left to go. It was a deliberately bright, country-tinged album with Greg Puciato on backing vocals and a thirteen-year gap behind it, and it confused a lot of people who had been waiting for something that sounded like Dirt.
I Want Blood is the record that answers Brighten. The choice is deliberate. In the round of press interviews that accompanied the album, Cantrell was unusually direct about it. He told Revolver that listeners should look at his history if they wanted to know where his musical heart sits. He told Guitar World it was a serious piece of work and some of his best songwriting and playing. Translation: he had something to prove, mostly to himself, and Brighten had not done the proving.
Why a Fourth Solo Album, Why Now
The gap between Cantrell solo records is the interesting number. Boggy Depot landed in 1998, Degradation Trip in 2002, Brighten in 2021. Nineteen years between his second and third solo albums, then three years to his fourth. The acceleration is not an accident. The conversation around Alice in Chains has, since 2018, been openly cautious about whether another record will happen. Cantrell has not killed the idea but he has not committed to it either. Two solo albums inside three years is the longest sustained burst of solo writing he has ever produced.
The other factor is that he had a producer he wanted to work with and a studio he wanted to record in. Joe Barresi is best known for [Songs for the Deaf](/posts/the-making-of-songs-for-the-deaf-by-queens-of-the-stone-age/), for Tool's 10,000 Days and Fear Inoculum, for Bad Religion, the Melvins, Soundgarden, Coheed and Cambria. His JHOC room in Pasadena is one of the most analogue-heavy facilities in greater Los Angeles. Cantrell told Louder Sound he wanted a record where the tones were captured in a single room with the band playing together. JHOC is built for that. Brighten was largely a remote, assembled-in-pieces record. I Want Blood is the opposite.
Joe Barresi and JHOC
Barresi's signature, going all the way back to his work with the Melvins and Queens of the Stone Age in the early 2000s, is room-microphone density. He places multiple stereo pairs around a drum kit and a guitar cab and then lets the bleed do the work. The result is a guitar sound that feels physically large without being overcompressed, and a drum sound with an unusual amount of air around it. You hear both of those signatures on I Want Blood within thirty seconds of pressing play.
The other thing Barresi brings is patience with vocal layering. Cantrell has built almost every Alice in Chains vocal since Facelift around stacked unison tracks, often with himself or William DuVall a third or a fifth apart. Barresi is one of the few engineers Cantrell has worked with outside the Alice in Chains camp who treats those stacks as the central instrument of a song rather than a sweetener. Vilified, Off the Rails, the title track and Held Your Tongue all have the unmistakeable layered-Cantrell vocal stack mixed at the front of the picture rather than buried under guitars.
The Cast Cantrell Called In
The guest list is the part of I Want Blood that got the press coverage at announcement, and it is genuinely unusual. Cantrell handles all lead vocals, all lead guitar and a portion of the bass himself. The rest of the rhythm section is shared between two of the most recognised bass players in rock and two veteran drummers from genuinely different lineages.
The headline names are Robert Trujillo of Metallica and Duff McKagan of Guns N Roses, who split bass on six of the nine songs. Gil Sharone, best known from Team Sleep and Stolen Babies, plays drums on seven tracks. Mike Bordin of Faith No More fills the chair on the other two. Greg Puciato of the Dillinger Escape Plan and the Black Queen returns from Brighten for a single backing vocal on Echoes of Laughter. Vincent Jones plays keyboards on four songs. Lola Colette adds further backing vocals.
The Bass Chair Question
The bass split is the most fan-pleasing single decision on the record. Trujillo plays Vilified, Off the Rails and It Comes. McKagan plays Afterglow, I Want Blood and Echoes of Laughter. Cantrell takes the rest himself. The difference is audible from track to track and Cantrell does not try to hide it. Trujillo's tone is the harder, more percussive sound from his Suicidal Tendencies and Metallica work, with a strong upper-mid attack that makes Vilified feel like it is constantly braking on the riff. McKagan's playing is the looser, slightly behind-the-beat pocket that has anchored every Guns N Roses record since Appetite for Destruction. Afterglow, which Loudwire singled out as the album's mid-record pivot, is essentially a McKagan groove with Cantrell soloing over the top.
What Cantrell has been careful not to do is turn the casting into a gimmick. There is no track on the record that exists purely to show off who is playing. The two bassists are matched to the songs that suit their pocket, and the rest of the bass parts are written by Cantrell himself with the kind of root-note economy that he has always favoured on Alice in Chains records. Held Your Tongue and Let It Lie are both Cantrell on bass and you have to listen for the change.
Mike Bordin on Two Tracks
Mike Bordin's appearance is the personnel detail that the album's announcement coverage mostly missed. He plays the full kit on the title track and, more strangely, on only the chorus parts of Let It Lie, with Gil Sharone taking the intro, verses and outro. Splitting a single song between two drummers is the kind of decision a producer makes when neither performance felt right alone. The result is a Let It Lie that physically opens up at every chorus, with Bordin's heavier kick and slower fills lifting the song into a different gear before it folds back into Sharone's tighter pocket.
Bordin himself has rarely played outside the Faith No More and Ozzy Osbourne orbits in the last twenty years. His presence is one of the small signals on I Want Blood that the record was put together by people who like each other's records rather than by the kind of casting agency that runs most modern guest-laden releases. Bordin and Cantrell have known each other since the Lollapalooza era. The two-track contribution is, in that sense, the favour of a friend rather than a marketing line.
The Greg Puciato Appearance
Greg Puciato is the only returning Brighten guest. On that record he sang substantial backing vocals on multiple tracks and his voice was openly used as a counterweight to Cantrell's. On I Want Blood he is credited only on Echoes of Laughter, and the part is a soft, supporting third underneath the main vocal rather than a duet. The choice is consistent with the rest of the record: I Want Blood is a Cantrell-fronted album, not a collaboration, and the guest vocal is calibrated accordingly.
Puciato's working relationship with Cantrell is older than the Brighten partnership suggests. The two have shared stages and writing rooms periodically since Dillinger Escape Plan disbanded in 2017, and Puciato's solo work on Federal Prisoner has cited Cantrell as an influence and friend. Lola Colette, the album's other credited backing vocalist, contributes textural rather than featured parts.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | ||
| Lead vocals, lead guitar, bass | Jerry Cantrell | Bass on Throw Me a Line, Let It Lie and Held Your Tongue |
| Bass (guest) | ||
| Bass | Robert Trujillo | Vilified, Off the Rails, It Comes |
| Bass | Duff McKagan | Afterglow, I Want Blood, Echoes of Laughter |
| Drums | ||
| Drums | Gil Sharone | Vilified, Off the Rails, Afterglow, Echoes of Laughter, Throw Me a Line, Held Your Tongue, It Comes; intro, verses and outro of Let It Lie |
| Drums | Mike Bordin | I Want Blood (full song); chorus parts of Let It Lie |
| Keys and vocals | ||
| Keyboards | Vincent Jones | Afterglow, I Want Blood, Echoes of Laughter, Held Your Tongue |
| Backing vocals | Greg Puciato | Echoes of Laughter only |
| Backing vocals | Lola Colette | Textural backing across the album |
| Production and technical | ||
| Producer | Joe Barresi | Tracking and primary production at JHOC, Pasadena |
| Production, mixing, engineering | Jerry Cantrell | Credited alongside Barresi |
| Additional engineering | Jun Murakawa | |
| Mastering | Bob Ludwig | Final master at Gateway Mastering, Portland, Maine |
| Mastering assistance | Bob Jackson, Brian Lee | |
| Visuals | ||
| Art direction, design | Ryan Clark | Invisible Creature |
| Photography | Darren Craig | |
Pre-production and Influences
Cantrell has been more open than usual about the listening that fed into the writing. Across the press cycle he named Jeff Beck, the Cure, Pink Floyd and Robin Trower as guiding presences on the record's sonic palette, and Aerosmith, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, Scorpions and Thin Lizzy as the reference points for the album's dual-guitar harmonies. That second list is the one that hears more on the record. Off the Rails contains what Guitar World's Amit Sharma called a cheeky nod to Iron Maiden's Wasted Years, and the album's lead lines are stacked in thirds far more aggressively than anything on Brighten.
The Beck influence comes through on the vibrato. Cantrell has always favoured a heavy, slightly behind-the-beat finger vibrato, and on Echoes of Laughter and the long instrumental passages in It Comes he leans into a Beck-style bent-note approach that he has not used in years. Robin Trower is the reference for the more drawn-out, almost dub-paced spaces in the album's second half, particularly the closing minutes of It Comes.
Recording the Record
The record was tracked at JHOC over a working schedule that Cantrell and Barresi have both characterised as fast by modern standards. The whole record was written, demoed and tracked over roughly an eighteen-month window after Brighten's touring cycle finished, and the actual band tracking dates at JHOC were short. Cantrell told Guitar Player he wanted to make a record where the takes were performances rather than constructed objects, and the available bass and drum scheduling around Trujillo, McKagan, Sharone and Bordin's other commitments meant the band had to be efficient.
The signal chains were Barresi standard: vintage Neve and API preamps into 2-inch analogue tape capture, then transferred to digital for editing and mixing. Cantrell played a Gibson Les Paul Junior alongside his usual G&L Rampage signatures, and ran a mix of his familiar Bogner stack and Barresi's house collection of vintage Marshall, Hiwatt and Park amps. The result is the most varied palette of guitar tones on any Cantrell solo record. Vilified and Off the Rails are recognisably the Bogner sound. Echoes of Laughter and Held Your Tongue are an entirely different room.
The Singles Campaign
Two formal singles were lifted from the record. Vilified arrived first on 26 July 2024, with the album announcement attached, paired with an official music video shot in Los Angeles. Afterglow followed on 6 September 2024 as the second pre-release single, building towards the 18 October album date. An official visualizer for the title track was released around the album drop itself but without a formal radio campaign, and a deluxe lyric and spoken-word campaign followed in late January 2025.
The pacing is conservative by modern standards. Three months from first single to album, with a single follow-up in the middle. Cantrell has been consistent across his career in disliking the modern approach of dripping out four or five tracks before a record arrives, and the I Want Blood rollout reflects that. By the time the album landed, most of the press cycle had already happened around Vilified.
Vilified and the AI Question
Vilified is the album's statement of intent and Cantrell has been unusually clear about what it is about. The song's lyric is a direct response to the arrival of generative artificial intelligence in the music industry. He told Kerrang! that science fiction and the fear of technology have been around a long time, from The Terminator to Ex Machina, but that AI is a boogeyman the industry grew up with and is now living inside. The video reinforces the theme with stark monochrome imagery and an industrial-noir aesthetic.
Musically the song is a grinding minor-key figure built around a single repeated guitar line, with Trujillo's bass adding the percussive lower-mid weight. The chorus opens out into one of the album's most obvious Cantrell vocal stacks. It is the most overtly Alice in Chains-coded song on the record and was clearly chosen as the lead single because it draws the straightest possible line between the solo album and the fans who arrived via Dirt and [Jar of Flies](/posts/the-making-of-jar-of-flies-by-alice-in-chains/).
The Title Track
I Want Blood, the song, is the album's centre of gravity. Kerrang! described its main riff as having the gallop that characterises Queens of the Stone Age's more celebrated music. KNAC heard a holler-along Foo Fighters chorus inside it. LouderSound called the energy punk rock. They are all partly right. The riff itself is a four-bar gallop, the chorus is open and anthemic in a way Cantrell's songs rarely are, and the song is the shortest standalone moment on the record at four and a half minutes. McKagan's bass is the engine.
Mike Bordin's drumming is the other reason the song works. The kick pattern is heavier and slower than Sharone's elsewhere on the record, and the snare lands a fraction behind the beat in a way that gives the gallop more drag than it has any business carrying. It is the single most physical track on the album and was the obvious choice for the title.
Tracklist
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vilified | Jerry Cantrell | 4:32 | Yes (26 July 2024) | Lead single; Trujillo on bass; AI-themed lyric and video |
| 2 | Off the Rails | Jerry Cantrell | 5:26 | Trujillo on bass; cheeky nod to Iron Maiden's Wasted Years | |
| 3 | Afterglow | Jerry Cantrell | 4:38 | Yes (6 September 2024) | Second single; McKagan on bass; Vincent Jones keys |
| 4 | I Want Blood | Jerry Cantrell | 4:22 | Title track; McKagan on bass; Mike Bordin on drums | |
| 5 | Echoes of Laughter | Cantrell, Tyler Bates | 5:11 | Only co-write on the record; McKagan on bass; Greg Puciato backing vocal | |
| 6 | Throw Me a Line | Jerry Cantrell | 5:01 | Cantrell on bass; full Sharone drum performance | |
| 7 | Let It Lie | Jerry Cantrell | 5:45 | Split drum performance: Sharone on intro, verses and outro, Bordin on choruses | |
| 8 | Held Your Tongue | Jerry Cantrell | 4:46 | Cantrell on bass; Vincent Jones keys | |
| 9 | It Comes | Jerry Cantrell | 6:32 | Trujillo on bass; longest track on the record; closing instrumental coda |
The Songs in Detail
Off the Rails is the song that critics reached for hardest when arguing the album was a return to form. Blabbermouth wrote that the song recalled Alice in Chains's 1990s era with Layne Staley, and the comparison is fair. The verse vocal sits in the same close-harmony Cantrell-and-Staley register that defined Dirt, and the chorus opens into a wide, dragging hook. Trujillo's bass plays a counter-melodic line under the second verse that is, deliberately or not, almost identical in shape to the riff under Wasted Years. Sharma's spotting of the Iron Maiden quote is one of the few writer-level observations of the press cycle.
Afterglow is the album's most accessible song and was correctly chosen as the second single. The arrangement leans on Vincent Jones's keys, which sit under the verses as a sustained pad and then come up under the chorus in a manner reminiscent of the synth lines on Alice in Chains's Black Gives Way to Blue. McKagan's bass is the looser pocket that frees Cantrell's lead vocal to sit slightly ahead of the beat. The result is the closest thing the record has to a radio single.
Throw Me a Line is the deepest cut on the record and one of its quietest pleasures. The song is built around a slow Cantrell-on-bass figure under a chiming, almost arpeggiated lead line. Sharone's drumming is restrained throughout. It is the song that benefits most obviously from Barresi's room-mic philosophy: the cymbal work has air around it that would be flattened on a more compressed mix. Held Your Tongue is its closest cousin on the back half, also Cantrell-on-bass and also restrained, with Vincent Jones's keys colouring the chorus.
It Comes is the closer and the album's deliberate epic. At six and a half minutes it is the longest track Cantrell has written outside the Alice in Chains canon since the Degradation Trip sessions. Trujillo's bass anchors a slow, doom-paced figure for the first three minutes before the song opens into an extended instrumental coda. The Robin Trower influence Cantrell mentioned to Guitar World is most audible here. Tuonela Magazine's review correctly called the album's darker, heavier sound a near-sequel to Degradation Trip and It Comes is the track that earns that comparison most directly.
Echoes of Laughter and the Tyler Bates Co-Write
Echoes of Laughter is the only song on the record with a writing partner credit. Tyler Bates, the film and television composer behind the Guardians of the Galaxy and John Wick scores, shares the credit with Cantrell. Bates has worked with Marilyn Manson, with the Devil's Throne project alongside Cantrell, and on the Sons of Anarchy soundtrack work that first brought him and Cantrell into the same orbit. The Bates fingerprint on the song is structural rather than melodic: the arrangement breathes in a way that is unusual for a Cantrell song, with long open passages between vocal phrases and a coda that fades out on a sustained string-like keyboard texture.
The song is the album's ballad, and it carries McKagan on bass, Sharone on drums, Vincent Jones on keys and Greg Puciato on the only featured backing vocal of the record. Several reviewers compared the closing minutes to Pink Floyd, which is fair to the keyboard texture if generous to the song's actual length. It is the only track on I Want Blood that physically slows down, and it earns its place as the emotional rest stop in the middle of the running order.
Tone, Gear and the Anti-Modeller Stance
Cantrell has been openly hostile to modelling-amp technology for the last decade and the I Want Blood press cycle did not soften that. He told Guitar World in November 2024 that a lot of his peers had turned to modellers, that he was not there yet, and that modellers still felt like an electronic toy to him. The album reflects that. Every guitar sound on the record is a real amplifier in a real room, captured through Barresi's outboard chain to analogue tape.
The instruments listed on the personnel sheet are the usual Cantrell collection. His G&L Rampage signatures are present across the rhythm tracks. The Gibson Les Paul Junior, less commonly associated with him, was used for parts of Vilified and Off the Rails and accounts for some of the rawer single-coil bite on those songs. The amplifier collection at JHOC includes vintage Marshall plexis, Hiwatt DR103s and Park heads, and Cantrell rotated through them depending on the song. For Cantrell-on-guitar listeners, the diversity of tones is more obvious than on any of his previous solo records.
Singles and Charts
| Release | Date | Format | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vilified (single) | 26 July 2024 | Digital, music video | Lead single; album announcement |
| Afterglow (single) | 6 September 2024 | Digital | Second pre-release single |
| I Want Blood (album) | 18 October 2024 | Digital, CD | Standard edition |
| I Want Blood (visualizer) | October 2024 | YouTube visualizer | Title track promotional asset |
| I Want Blood deluxe | 31 January 2025 | Digital, vinyl | Spoken-word versions of all nine songs |
| Chart | Peak Position |
|---|---|
| US Billboard 200 | 145 |
| UK Albums Chart | 99 |
| UK Rock and Metal Albums Chart | 3 |
| Scottish Albums Chart | 21 |
| Swiss Albums Chart | 40 |
The Critical Reception
Critical response was loud and largely positive. Blabbermouth gave the record nine out of ten, with Anne Erickson singling out the Pink Floyd-leaning closing minutes of Echoes of Laughter and the Foo Fighters-coded title track. Kerrang!'s Steve Beebee awarded it four stars out of five and described the album as more oppressive than Brighten. Classic Rock gave it four stars. AllMusic's James Christopher Monger gave it four stars and noted the return to the metal-influenced, riff-driven sound for which Cantrell and Alice in Chains are known. Louder's Emma Johnston called it flawless and unflinching classic rock for a cruel modern world.
The headline reception came from Loudwire, which ranked I Want Blood as the second-best rock album of 2024 in Chad Childers's December year-end list. For a solo album from a guitarist whose main band had not released a record in six years, that placement is unusually high and reflected how much of the year's rock conversation the record absorbed in the back half of 2024. The dissenting voice in the consensus is the perfectly reasonable observation that the album does not break new ground for Cantrell, an angle that ignores the actual intent of the record.
The Deluxe Edition and Spoken-Word Versions
The deluxe edition that arrived on 31 January 2025 is the more unusual of the album's two releases. It contains spoken-word reinterpretations of all nine songs, each set to a fresh musical score by a different contributor. Maxwell Urasky scored Vilified and It Comes. Joe Barresi himself scored Off the Rails. Greg Puciato scored Afterglow. Vincent Jones and George Adrian scored the title track. Roy Mayorga, formerly of Stone Sour, scored two tracks. Gil Sharone and his brother Rani Sharone scored Throw Me a Line. Michael Rozon scored Held Your Tongue.
The format is unusual enough to be worth flagging. Spoken-word reinterpretations of every track on an album are the kind of thing solo artists with side-project instincts attempt, and Cantrell has clearly enjoyed pulling it together as a companion piece. The deluxe edition shipped exclusively on vinyl and digital and runs to a further 21 minutes 19 seconds.
Alongside Brighten and Degradation Trip
Inside the Cantrell solo catalogue, I Want Blood now sits between two clearly-defined poles. Brighten in 2021 was the country-tinged, southern-rock-shaded record, written through a pandemic and largely assembled remotely. Degradation Trip in 2002 was the dark, sprawling double album recorded during a turbulent period for Alice in Chains. Tuonela Magazine is right that I Want Blood is the closest spiritual relative of Degradation Trip in the catalogue, but it is also far shorter, far tighter and far less dense. Where Degradation Trip ran to two discs and 25 songs, I Want Blood is nine songs and forty-six minutes.
That brevity is the record's biggest single argument for itself. Brighten was a fourteen-track record that did not need to be. Degradation Trip was a 25-track record that, in retrospect, did. I Want Blood is the first solo record where Cantrell has trusted himself to make a tight, single-disc statement and let it stand on its own. The discipline shows in the running order and the absence of obvious filler tracks.
The Filter Tour 2025
On 15 October 2024, three days before the album dropped, Cantrell announced a North American headline tour for 2025 with Filter as direct support. The tour ran through spring 2025 and was Cantrell's first solo headline run since the Brighten cycle. The setlist drew heavily from I Want Blood and Brighten, with Alice in Chains material limited to a handful of tracks per night and rotated across the run. The decision to keep the Alice in Chains content sparse was deliberate. Cantrell told Louder Sound that he wanted the solo show to be a solo show.
Filter as the support choice is notable. Richard Patrick's band has a parallel history to Alice in Chains as one of the alternative-rock acts who broke in the post-Nirvana wave of the mid-1990s, and the pairing on tour reads as a deliberate generational statement. The tour did not extend to Europe in 2025, although Cantrell appeared at a handful of European festival dates in the summer of 2025.
Where It Sits in Cantrell's Discography
The question fans most often ask about a Cantrell solo record is how it compares to the Alice in Chains catalogue. The honest answer is that I Want Blood is the first solo album where the question is genuinely open. Boggy Depot was the experimental swing. Degradation Trip was the cathartic double-album that came out of a deeply difficult period. Brighten was the deliberate left turn. I Want Blood is the first solo album that sounds like it could have been an Alice in Chains record without William DuVall on it, and the only reason it is not one is because Cantrell decided he wanted to make it under his own name.
Whether that is a strength or a limitation depends on where the listener sits. For the fan whose entry point was Dirt and who has been quietly waiting for Cantrell to make another record like it, I Want Blood is the album they have been waiting twenty years for. For the fan who valued Brighten's left-turn, this record is a step back into familiar territory. Both readings are defensible.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The two-drummer track | Let It Lie is the only song on the album with two different drummers, with Gil Sharone playing the intro, verses and outro and Mike Bordin playing the chorus parts. |
| Only co-write | Echoes of Laughter is the only song on the record not written solely by Cantrell. Film composer Tyler Bates shares the credit. |
| The Wasted Years quote | Guitar World's Amit Sharma spotted what he called a cheeky nod to Iron Maiden's Wasted Years inside Off the Rails. Cantrell did not deny it in subsequent interviews. |
| Loudwire's verdict | Loudwire ranked I Want Blood as the second-best rock album of 2024 in its December year-end list. |
| The label | Double J Music is Cantrell's own imprint. He left Roadrunner after Brighten and the new label gives him direct ownership of his solo masters going forward. |
| The mastering chair | Bob Ludwig, who mastered the album at Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine, also mastered every Alice in Chains record from Facelift to The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here. I Want Blood was one of the last albums Ludwig mastered before announcing his retirement. |
| The Les Paul Junior | Cantrell's signature guitars are G&L Rampages, but parts of Vilified and Off the Rails were tracked with a Gibson Les Paul Junior for the rawer single-coil bite. |
| Bordin's first Cantrell credit | Mike Bordin had never previously played on a Cantrell solo record or an Alice in Chains record before I Want Blood, despite the two having known each other since the Lollapalooza era. |
| The spoken-word deluxe | The 31 January 2025 deluxe edition contains spoken-word reinterpretations of all nine songs, each scored by a different contributor including Joe Barresi himself. |
| The AI lyric | Vilified is Cantrell's first openly topical lyric in years and a direct response to generative AI. He cited The Terminator and Ex Machina as the cultural frame for the song in his Kerrang! interview. |
| Bass split by track count | Cantrell himself plays bass on more tracks than either Trujillo or McKagan. He covers Throw Me a Line, Let It Lie and Held Your Tongue, totalling three songs against three each for the guest bassists. |
| The Filter tour | The 2025 North American tour with Filter as direct support was Cantrell's first headline solo run since the Brighten cycle and ran through spring 2025. |
The Verdict
I Want Blood is the most focused record Jerry Cantrell has put his name to in over twenty years. The brevity is the point. Nine songs, forty-six minutes, no concept, no padding, a guest list assembled from people he actually likes working with rather than people his label suggested. Joe Barresi's production is the cleanest analogue rock-album mix of 2024, the dual-drummer trick on Let It Lie is the kind of detail that rewards a third listen, and the bass split between Trujillo and McKagan does what every fantasy-bass-casting decision since the dawn of time has failed to do, which is sound like a genuine creative choice rather than a marketing one.
What it does not do is reinvent Cantrell as a songwriter. The riffs are recognisably his. The vocal melodies live in the same register they have lived in since Facelift. The Iron Maiden quote on Off the Rails is a wink to the listener that knows. None of those are weaknesses, but anyone arriving at the record looking for the surprise that Brighten delivered will not find it here. What this record offers instead is the version of Cantrell that the Dirt-and-Jar-of-Flies audience has been waiting for, sharpened by twenty years of perspective and recorded by a producer who knows exactly what to do with him. On that brief, it is a near-flawless record. Riffology score: 86/100.
If this review hits the mark or you think we have missed something, drop into the comments below. I Want Blood is one of the records the Riffology podcast hosts will be coming back to repeatedly across 2025 and beyond, and Cantrell's solo catalogue is exactly the kind of three-album arc that rewards a long conversation. The podcast is available on every major platform.
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