Fire From the Gods have shared a video for their latest single, “Human.” The track is nothing shy of a polite argument that escalates into a sermon you didn’t realize you needed until you were already nodding along. It’s heavy in the way modern metal understands heaviness, not just humble metalcore riffs and righteous fury, but a kind of emotional ballast, the sense that someone has decided to take responsibility for the mess and then scream about it in tune. The track feels less like a rebirth than a clarification. This is the sound of a band reasserting what it is about, which is a surprisingly rare move in a genre that often confuses continuity with loyalty and volume with truth.
There is, hovering around “Human,” the unavoidable ghost of the previous vocalist, who—after being convicted of child endangerment—has recently resurfaced in the press to suggest that the current lineup has somehow exploited his downfall from several states away, like a touring morality play. This would be more compelling if it weren’t the rhetorical equivalent of blaming the fire department for the smell of smoke. Fire From the Gods didn’t use the conviction; they survived it if anything. And survival, inconveniently, is not a neutral act. It requires motion. It requires replacement. It requires the band to choose music over martyrdom, which is a decision that often offends people who believe accountability should come with a lifetime exclusivity clause.
I jokingly (but also not jokingly) just said, in my end-of-year article, that we reserve unconditional love for a lack of lineup change because art feels dependent on the humans who make it. But I also understand that unconditional love doesn’t mean unconditional employment, and it definitely doesn’t mean freezing a band in amber out of respect for someone else’s catastrophic choices. Lineup changes are not betrayals; they’re admissions that time keeps happening. Bands are not friendships with amplifiers. They are vehicles. Sometimes the driver crashes. Sometimes the passengers get out and keep walking. That’s not cruelty—it is a harsh reality.
Which is why Myke Terry feels less like a replacement and more like a resolution. Terry has built a career on the unglamorous, deeply necessary task of picking up broken projects and dragging them, alive, across the finish line. He doesn’t parachute in for the victory lap; he shows up when the structure is compromised and the exit signs are flickering. On “Human,” his voice isn’t trying to erase the past—it’s contextualizing it. There’s a steadiness here, a sense that the band finally sounds like it knows where it’s going instead of where it’s been wounded. That matters. Not because redemption arcs are cool (they’re not), but because completion is rarer than chaos.
And yes, one scathing line is deserved for the outlets that dutifully laundered the former vocalist’s statement into “controversy,” as if accountability were a vibe and not a series of choices with consequences: mistaking an emotional deflection for objective truth is not journalism, it’s fan fiction with a press pass.
“Human” ultimately works because it refuses to confuse empathy with indulgence. It understands that you can acknowledge pain without surrendering the narrative to it. The song feels like an argument about free will disguised as a metal track—and Fire From the Gods seem finally comfortable winning that argument without apologizing for who’s holding the microphone.
Watch the clip below:
