Singled Out: Art of Shock's You Are The Plague

09-18-2026

Hollywood heavy rockers Art of Shock just released their brand new single "You Are The Plague" and to celebrate we asked Art to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

There's been this strange thing happening around Art of Shock since we started: every time we got right to the edge of something, something happened that kept sending us back to square one.

We've had moments where it felt like the band was right on the cusp of breaking through to another level, and then the ground would move underneath us. Sometimes it was the music business. Sometimes it was circumstances completely outside anybody's control, like our first album dropping the day the lockdowns started and all of our touring plans getting postponed for years. We were supposed to be out there playing those songs, and suddenly the entire world stopped.

On top of that, in the process we all ended up living in different cities. Life kept moving, the new dynamic wasn't easy for everybody, and ultimately one of us couldn't adapt. The rest of us didn't have it easy either. What had once been a bunch of guys in the same place trying to push the same thing forward suddenly became much more complicated.

But the three of us who remained stuck together. We started flying in for writing and recording sessions, figuring out how to keep creating even though we weren't all living in the same place anymore. We traveled together around the world too, just sadly not playing music. Somewhere along the way, after many sessions, many songs, a million beers, and coming up with all kinds of plans and schemes in 24-hour izakayas in Tokyo, cemeteries in Paris, pubs in London, dive bars in Mexico City, and every bar in the Pacific Northwest, we started to feel like we were ready to share more of our ideas with the world.

There was another side to all of this too. Our previous label chapter had become complicated, to put it politely. But this isn't really a story about the music business, although it has a lot to do with it. We learned a lot from that experience, both good and bad. One of the biggest lessons was how important it was for us to understand what was happening around our own music and learn how to take the reins of our own musical existence.

Eventually the conversation between the three of us changed from "How do we keep Art of Shock going? Do we even want to?" to "How much of this can we actually do ourselves? Is this a challenge we're willing to accept?"

That's where AOMFS Records came from. We started our own label and set up AOMFS Music to handle our publishing. The idea was to keep as much as possible in-house, learn how to do the things we had always depended on other people to do, and use outside vendors only when they could bring something to the table that we genuinely needed. It wasn't about pretending we knew everything. We definitely didn't. It was about learning the machinery, owning the decisions, and making sure we understood what was happening with our own band.

And after everything we had been through, complete independence suddenly didn't sound crazy anymore. It sounded like the obvious next step.

"You Are The Plague" felt to us like the right song to begin this chapter. We revisit some textures that we've been known for in the past, but the song also introduces a bunch of new elements to the band's vocabulary. It really does throw some clues out there about what's to come. But most importantly, there was nobody at any point telling us it needed to be more of one thing or less of another. We made the song we wanted to make, and we decided how we wanted to release it.

For me, the song has come to represent that feeling of finally moving again. After years of feeling like we were constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time, we stopped trusting that things would eventually align themselves. This time, we're aligning them any way we want.

We decide when to move. We decide how we move.

"You Are The Plague" is the first Art of Shock single released through AOMFS Records, but in a lot of ways it feels bigger than one release. It's three guys who went through a lot together, stayed together, learned from it, and finally decided that whatever happens to Art of Shock next, we want to be responsible for it.

For the first time in a long time, we're not waiting to find out what the next chapter is.

We're writing it.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here