Oath in Bones came from writing against every soft rationalization that had started to sound normal. The album is less about anger than it is about refusing sedation.
The guitar layers were tracked to feel like forward pressure instead of wall-of-sound heroics. We wanted motion, not monument. A lot of the takes stayed rough because the roughness was part of the moral center.
Lyrically this record is obsessed with verbs: hold, choose, refuse, stand, pay. It is a record about action under pressure, not about identity as decoration.