Jason Crews is the owner and editor of INFRARED MAGAZINE and a Dallas–Fort Worth-based music journalist and concert photographer. Through INFRARED MAGAZINE and JASON CREWS PHOTOGRAPHY, he covers rock, metal, country, and live music with a focus on album reviews, artist features, concert coverage, and photography. His work is driven by a genuine passion for music and helping artists connect with new audiences through honest writing, strong visuals, and meaningful storytelling.
CORROSION OF CONFORMITY ‘Good God / Baad Man’
Rating: 9 / 10 Stars
CORROSION OF CONFORMITY is: Pepper Keenan (guitar, vocals), Woody Weatherman (guitar), Bobby Landgraf (bass), and Stanton Moore (drums)
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REVIEW – Forty-four years into CORROSION OF CONFORMITY‘s existence, the most interesting thing the band could have done was refuse to make the safe veteran record. Good God / Baad Man does exactly that. Rather than compressing everything recognizable about C.O.C. into another comfortable collection of Southern metal riffs, Pepper Keenan and Woody Weatherman open the doors wide enough for punk, doom, psychedelic rock, swampy blues, acoustic Americana, funk, and the massive gravitational pull of Black Sabbath to occupy the same space.
Arriving this Friday, April 3rd, through Nuclear Blast, Good God / Baad Man is not merely a long album. It is a genuine double album with two personalities.
It also marks CORROSION OF CONFORMITY‘s first studio album since 2018’s No Cross No Crown. Those eight years have changed the shape of the band. Founding drummer Reed Mullin died in 2020, and longtime bassist Mike Dean departed in 2024. Keenan and Weatherman move forward here with Bobby Landgraf on bass and Stanton Moore returning on drums after previously playing on 2005’s In the Arms of God. Grammy-winning producer Warren Riker gives the record the kind of raw, physical presence that makes much of it feel less assembled than captured—a band in a room following riffs wherever they want to go.
That freedom becomes the central idea of the record.
The Good God half is the heavier of the two: aggressive, riff-driven, psychedelic around the edges, and frequently enormous. Baad Man loosens the grip and digs deeper into Southern rock, blues, funk, doom, country, and the kind of weathered American roots music that has always existed beneath C.O.C.’s distortion. Separating those impulses instead of forcing them into a single uniform sequence is what allows an album this broad to maintain an identity.
“Good God? / Final Dawn” understands that scale immediately. Its opening atmosphere stretches the tension before the band drops into the main body of the song, where galloping movement and crushing guitar weight establish that this version of CORROSION OF CONFORMITY has not returned cautiously. The track has the architecture of an entrance: suspense first, impact second.
“You Or Me” drives even deeper into the heavy side of the record. The guitar sound is thick enough to feel physical, and there is an unmistakable Sabbath lineage running through the arrangement without the song becoming simple imitation. The atmosphere recalls the darker, stranger side of Sabotage-era heaviness, with layers of guitar creating the sensation of something enormous shifting beneath the song.
Then “Gimme Some Moore” tears the structure apart.
Instead of another massive doom crawl, the band reaches backward toward its punk and crossover roots. The song is fast, fiery, and deliberately rough around the edges, with Stanton Moore driving the track and Ministry’s Al Jourgensen adding to the sense of controlled chaos. It sounds like musicians with decades behind them remembering what it felt like to make noise before anyone had expectations for what CORROSION OF CONFORMITY was supposed to become. That energy gives the album an important jolt. History is present, but nostalgia never takes control.
“The Handler” returns to groove. Its bass-heavy movement and bouncing rhythmic center give the track an almost late-’70s heaviness, as though classic Sabbath weight has been dragged through several decades of Southern sludge. It is less interested in speed than pressure. The riff does not chase the listener; it plants itself in the path and waits.
“Bedouin’s Hand” functions as a brief instrumental passage, but it does more than divide songs. Its Middle Eastern-flavored scale work changes the air around the record and introduces a more mystical atmosphere just before Good God reaches its most expansive moment.
That moment is “Run For Your Life.”
At more than nine minutes, it is the longest track on the album and the first disc’s real test of patience and ambition. The song moves like a slow Southern river polluted with psychedelic color, spoken-word weight, and doom. Instead of racing toward a conventional payoff, it drifts, expands, and lets the atmosphere become part of the composition. This is where the first half fully reveals that its heaviness is not only about distortion. Space can be heavy. Repetition can be heavy. Waiting for the next movement can be heavy. “Run For Your Life” understands all three.
Then the album crosses the line into Baad Man, and the personality changes almost immediately.
The title track begins with an accented spoken introduction before settling into a strange, funky Southern-rock swagger. If the first disc often feels like the walls are closing in, “Baad Man” kicks the door open and walks outside. The guitars still carry weight, but they move differently. The groove has loosened. The shoulders drop. C.O.C. are no longer trying to crush the room; they are strutting through it.
“Lose Yourself” tightens that idea into a compact hard-rock groove. Keenan’s gritty vocal delivery fits the song’s directness, and the synchronized guitar work gives it enough muscle to keep the second half from drifting too far away from the heaviness established earlier. It is short, grounded, and effective precisely because it does not overcomplicate itself.
“Mandra Sonos” is another small but important piece of sequencing. The acoustic instrumental functions like a weathered wooden bridge between the more conventional rock songs and the darker material ahead. On an album filled with huge guitar tones, giving the listener a little empty space makes the return of distortion hit harder.
“Asleep On The Killing Floor” brings that distortion back with purpose. The track carries thick stoner-metal crunch, but the lyrical tension gives the music a sharper edge than simple riff worship. The political weight and sense of social frustration reinforce how often C.O.C.’s best material works by making groove sound dangerous rather than comfortable. The song is heavy because the riff is heavy, but also because the mood behind it is hostile and unsettled.
“Handcuff County” may be the bluesiest track on the record. There is a greasy, early-ZZ Top quality in the picking and swagger, the sort of Southern groove that sounds like it has dust on the amplifier before the first note is played. CORROSION OF CONFORMITY have always understood that blues and metal are not opposing forces. Here, they let the blues stand closer to the front of the mix.
“Swallowing The Anchor” pulls the record back toward greater weight. Its slow-burning structure leans into the New Orleans rhythmic character that Stanton Moore brings naturally, while the extended guitar work gives the song room to breathe without losing tension. It is another example of the album succeeding because the band does not confuse heaviness with speed. The groove does the damage.
Then comes “Brickman,” one of the album’s most revealing turns.
Stripped back and acoustic-driven, the song carries a rustic Southern and country quality that would feel like a detour on a less carefully constructed record. Here it makes sense. The second half has spent its entire running time widening the definition of what CORROSION OF CONFORMITY can contain, and “Brickman” takes that freedom to its most vulnerable point. Keenan’s vocal performance lands differently without a wall of distortion behind it. The emotion has nowhere to hide.
That leaves “Forever Amplified” to close an album that could not end with a disposable final riff.
Written as a tribute to Reed Mullin and others the band has lost, the song brings emotional weight back into the full electric power of CORROSION OF CONFORMITY. The result is massive without becoming theatrical. Guest vocals from Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph deepen the gospel character in the arrangement, but the song’s real power comes from what the band allows the music to carry. After more than an hour of punk, Sabbath worship, blues, psychedelia, Southern rock, doom, acoustic space, and heavy-metal force, the final track turns memory itself into amplification.
That makes Good God / Baad Man more than a demonstration of range.
The album is about continuity without pretending nothing has changed.
Reed Mullin is gone. Mike Dean has moved on. Eight years have passed. Keenan and Weatherman could have responded by trying to rebuild an earlier version of CORROSION OF CONFORMITY as precisely as possible. Instead, they have made a record large enough to contain the band’s history without becoming trapped inside it.
The two-disc design is crucial. Good God satisfies the instinct for weight: thick riffs, psychedelic dread, punk aggression, doom, and the unmistakable shadow of Sabbath. Baad Man reveals the roots under that weight: Southern rock, blues, funk, acoustic country textures, New Orleans rhythm, and a willingness to let songs swagger instead of simply attack.
At sixty-six minutes, the album asks for more commitment than a streamlined modern metal record. Not every listener will want C.O.C. this expansive, and the deliberate pacing of tracks like “Run For Your Life” and “Swallowing The Anchor” makes no attempt to accommodate short attention spans. But reducing this record would also remove the thing that makes it compelling. Its excess has a purpose. The distance between “Gimme Some Moore” and “Brickman,” or between the psychedelic drag of “Run For Your Life” and the loose-limbed strut of “Baad Man,” is the point.
CORROSION OF CONFORMITY have made an album that sounds like musicians giving themselves permission to remember everything they love about rock and roll, then refusing to decide which parts belong together.
Somehow, they do.
Good God / Baad Man is heavy when it wants to crush, loose when it wants to breathe, strange when atmosphere matters more than structure, and genuinely moving when the band’s history finally catches up with the music. It honors what CORROSION OF CONFORMITY have been without reducing them to what they used to be.
When Good God / Baad Man arrives this Friday, listeners expecting CORROSION OF CONFORMITY simply to revisit the past are going to find something much more interesting: a band carrying every version of itself forward at once.
After more than four decades, that may be the most convincing form of nonconformity they have left.
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