“Sutures” connected with me immediately. The clean vocals in the chorus were what grabbed me.

Then I had to look up the title to be sure of its meaning.

Stitches. Something used to hold a wound together while the body gets on with repairing it. Which immediately complicates that reassurance in the chorus about time healing wounds. Sometimes there’s work involved before time gets its chance.

Written by Robb Flynn and Jared MacEachern who also perform the guitars and bass on the song with Matt Alston on drums.

The song moves between those clean, melodic choruses and death metal-like aggression in the verses, with a breakdown made for headbanging. Or bodies banging. I would have loved a guitar solo somewhere in there, but that’s a preference rather than a complaint. The song works without one.

More than three decades after “Burn My Eyes”, where do Machine Head go? “Of Kingdom and Crown” and “Unatoned” offered different refinements of their metal and rock vocabulary. What keeps me interested is how Robb Flynn continues finding something personal to put inside it.

“I can’t stop picking all the scabs off”

It’s an uncomfortable place to start.

“You know I’m not a savior, I can’t even save myself”

There’s a whole relationship collapsing inside that admission.

You can love someone and have nothing useful left to give them. You can also become so invested in being needed that admitting your limitations feels like losing your identity.

Then you’re still trying to do the rescuing while quietly hoping somebody notices you’re drowning.

That’s where Robb’s October 10 post enters the picture for me.

He called it “The End of an Era,” closing the “Unatoned” chapter after eighteen months of touring. Seven guitar players passing through the cycle. Crew changes. Seven shows performed as a three-piece. Deaths, breakups, cancelled flights, extraordinary gigs and empty rooms.

The post is grateful, proud and exhausted. Read it beside “Sutures” and the song acquires another possible resonance: people trying to hold something together through accumulated damage.

“I had to let the ending take its place”

Robb’s post makes a point of stopping to acknowledge that something has finished. Usually another tour or record is already being discussed. This time, he wants to go home.

There’s a distinction between finishing the work and letting yourself feel the ending.

The lyric follows that acceptance with an admission that peace hasn’t arrived. You can make the necessary decision and still feel terrible afterwards. Knowing why something ended doesn’t make you stop missing it.

“I wish that I could hate you”

Hatred would make the whole thing easier to explain.

You’d have a villain. Your friends would know whose side to take. You could stop wrestling with the inconvenient fact that somebody who hurt you also mattered to you.

Instead, Robb still wants what’s best for the other person. That leaves him with affection he can’t comfortably use and pain he can’t comfortably put down.

Then this line turns up:

“Deafening silence, the part I hated the most”

And suddenly I’m thinking about “Supercharger.”

Machine Head already have a song called “Deafening Silence” on that record. A phrase from their past turning up inside a new song, sending you back through the catalogue when you were supposed to be listening to the latest release.

I don’t know whether Robb intended that connection. It works on me anyway.

Silence after an argument can be worse than the argument. At least while you’re arguing there’s an exchange, however destructive. Afterwards, you’re left supplying both sides yourself.

“The scars are my sutures”

The title coming into focus.

My reading is that the damage has become part of what holds this person together. Experience gives you boundaries, teaches you what you can endure, changes what you’ll accept. There’s a cost to acquiring that knowledge.

In his post, Robb leaves the future for another day. He wants his own bed, his family, ordinary life.

After all that movement, stopping sounds like something he’s earned.

“Sutures” keeps asking for healing. The repetition makes the promise of time feel less certain, more like something Robb needs to believe.

I came for the clean chorus. I ended up thinking about how long it takes to come home from something.