Australian Machine Head fans have been treated to a unique experience of the band in 2025. Not long before their return for this year’s Good Things, the pioneering US band announced that they would be performing in rare power trio mode: Robb Flynn, Jared MacEachern, and Matt Alston.
Due to a last-minute family emergency that their touring guitarist needed to prioritise, Machine Head were unable to find a replacement at short notice; instead, they decided to power through in trio mode, and have since been providing a rare live experience for fans to be part of.
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None of Machine Head’s signature brand of ferocity and intensity live, however, has been lost at these shows.
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The release of their latest album, UNATØNED, has seen Machine Head lean into sounds that invite the listener to go on the journey songwriter Flynn has been eager to go down himself.
This isn’t to say that an album like UNATØNED has been made with universal appeal in mind. As Flynn notes, the back and forth Machine Head fans have with the band’s expansive catalogue is one that is a “love/hate relationship.”
“We’ve got a lot of people who really like the last four or five albums a lot,” he explains backstage at the Melbourne edition of this year’s Good Things. “They don’t really care about the early stuff. And then there’s a lot of people who really only care about the old stuff, and hate the new stuff!”
“We’re doing an acoustic section in the set and during that section, I’m talking about how I grew up on Bay Area thrash metal,” he adds. “I love thrash metal and thrash metal’s probably going to be a part of my heart, same with death metal, until the day I die. It’s in my DNA. But I also love to write sad songs. I love to write a song that might make someone cry, or makes me cry. I like to tap into that.
“With this latest record, we really leaned into that. There’s one song, ‘Not Long for This World’, that’s all clean vocals, and it’s a sad song. I tried to put some heavy vocals in there, but it sounded weird and out of place. Almost forced. It feels cool to go down these different routes, even after all these years, and challenge ourselves. Be fearless about it. We’re nine months into the cycle now, and I think that people have come around to realising it’s just really good music.”
UNATØNED, the band’s eleventh chapter, is one that Flynn remains stoked to stand beside. He is aware of how the different eras of Machine Head are likely going to appeal to different fans for different reasons, and that’s okay. For him, this is the true power of music. It’s going to hit you when it needs to.
“A perfect example for me is Disintegration by the Cure,” Flynn says. “My roommate loved the Cure, would play it constantly and I always thought it sucked, I was not into it at all. It wasn’t even five years later that I heard that record, I heard those songs; I just needed to hear them at that time. It hit me like a tonne of bricks and I just went down the rabbit hole. Now, I’m the biggest Cure fan. My friend always makes fun of me now!
“It really isn’t the typical arc of a band, to have this kind of later-stage success and to have it continue,” he adds. “Many people thought our last record was the best record we’d put out, people love this one as well; the new songs have been going over amazingly live. That’s not always the case!”
Touring an ‘Evening With…’ format of a show has given Flynn the ability to strip layers off Machine Head material in a way that exposes fresh perspectives on lyrical intensity; for the band, it’s a way to bolster even some of their heaviest material for new crowds.
“We can spread our wings with this ‘Evening With…’ format,” he explains. “We can go through the catalogue and take the listener, the people at the shows, on a journey.
“We’re doing two-hour, forty-minute headline shows, and it’s so nice! We don’t give a fuck, we’re just going to do whatever we want and enjoy the show. It’s great to have that freedom. People come out and they go on the journey with us, they go through the whole thing. The people who would normally like the new stuff, the rock with the old stuff as well, and vice versa. It feels really good.”
As the one founding member of Machine Head who has featured on every single album, Flynn is open about a very real reality where the band might call time on their career.
With a career in music that spans over three decades, Flynn remains creatively driven but is adamant of bowing out on his own terms — whenever that may be.
“I don’t want this to go on forever, it shouldn’t go on forever,” he says. “It needs to end. Things end. I don’t know when that is for us… I’m always thinking in the back of my head like, ‘It should probably end soon…?’ Just so we can have an exclamation point on it.
“You don’t want to be the old guys still hanging around at the party when the party ends. Like Stranger Things! It’s a phenomenon, right? But it’s ending. I hope I reach the point where, when the time comes, we step away gracefully.”
