Into Black

You are locked in with The Zoo, the place where the deep cuts still get a full spin and the story behind the riff matters as much as the riff itself. Pull up a chair for "Into Black," the heavy centerpiece of WAYS, the 2019 album from The Cold Stares. This one does not ease you in. It plants a boot on the floor and walks you to the edge. Guitar and voice come from Chris Tapp, drums from Brian Mullins, and the whole thing was cut at Sam Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis, the room that still carries the ghost of Sun Records in the walls. AntiFragile Music put WAYS out on October 18, 2019, and "Into Black" sits third in the running order, clocking in at three minutes and forty-four seconds, riding a slow crawl around seventy-three beats a minute. That tempo is the point. This is not a sprint. It is a descent.

Tapp has said this was probably the heaviest track on the album, and the one the band held the longest. The riff and the lyric had been sitting in a drawer for a few years under a different title, waiting for the right record. The sentiment never changed. It is about loving someone enough to go through whatever it takes to bring them back, even stepping off the edge of the world and through the gates of hell. When the video came around, he framed the story as a search for lost love across space and time, with plenty of ghosts in the lines, and a setting that felt timeless on purpose. Elsewhere he put it plainer still: the song is about loss and the refusal to accept it. The world and everyone around you have given up on the thing. You have not. You are still willing to walk into the dark for it.

The lyric spells that out without decoration. A thousand miles crawled, sun and wind burning the skin, a rider who has already abandoned the search, and still the vow to see that face again. Then the turn that gives the song its name: standing at the edge of the earth, stepping off into black, falling through the gates of hell, just so he could get you back. A thousand days of searching through distant lands follows, the world itself having forsaken the singer, and the same vow repeated. Writers who heard the album early heard a nod to Black Sabbath in the guitar weight and in those lines about the edge and the gates. It is blues-rock with the lights turned down and the volume left up, a power-duo arrangement that leaves no place to hide. Tapp's gravel carries the story. Mullins keeps the floor from giving way.

WAYS was built in an unusual way, and that matters if you want to know where "Into Black" lives. Tapp split the material into three EPs that were later gathered into the full album: WAYS Black for the hard rock, WAYS Blue for the blues, WAYS White for the country, western, and folk ballads. Three different ways, he said, matching the three wells the band drinks from. "Into Black" belongs to the black set, released ahead of the album on September 6, 2019, then folded into the thirteen-song LP. The rest of the track list runs from the Zeppelin-tinted opener "Any Way the Wind Blows" through the soul-leaning title song, the Texas-blues snap of "I Was a Fool," the quieter "Thorns" and "I Ain't the One," and on out to "Jackson Mississippi." Two songs from the project were named Track of the Week by Classic Rock Magazine in the UK. The album hit number one on Amazon's hard-rock best sellers and piled up serious streaming numbers in short order. For a self-released blues-rock record out of the Ohio River valley, that was a loud knock on the door.

The band behind it started as a reunion, not a master plan. Chris Tapp and Brian Mullins are Western Kentucky guys, Tapp out of Madisonville and Mullins tied to Henderson County, who first crossed paths in high-school bands and later in a group called Shelby. They split, circled back, and by the early 2010s were working as The Cold Stares out of Evansville, Indiana. The early years were a duo on purpose: guitar, voice, and drums, no bass player filling the middle, which forced the songs to stand on riff, lyric, and pocket. A Cold Wet Night and a Howling Wind moved real numbers and topped Amazon's blues-rock chart. Head Bent in 2017 landed a Dodge commercial. Mountain in 2018 sent "Sleeping With Lions" onto TNT's Animal Kingdom, a Monster Energy spot, ESPN, and the X Games. WAYS was the next step, the record where the hard-rock side, the blues side, and the folk side finally sat in the same room.

What followed is the part of the bio that still surprises people who only know the duo records. In 2021 the band signed to Mascot and released Heavy Shoes. In 2022 bassist Bryce Klueh joined, turning the stare into a trio. Voices arrived in 2023, The Southern in 2024, a second Southern chapter after that, and Texas in 2026, a record aimed at the state that raised so many of their reference points, from ZZ Top to the Vaughan brothers. Along the way "Mojo Hand" became the trailer song for Cyberpunk 2077, with well over ten million views on the video side and Keanu Reeves in the frame, and "Suffer Me" also turned up in the game. Sync placements stacked up. Stages were shared with Larkin Poe, Rival Sons, Reignwolf, Grand Funk Railroad, and Joe Bonamassa's Keeping the Blues Alive crew. The through-line never really changed. Fuzzed guitars, classic-rock riffs, room for a Cream-style stretch, and a songwriter who would rather tell you a story than show you a lick.

"Into Black" is the song that proves the story was already there before the bigger rooms opened up. It is the track they refused to rush, the one that sat until the album concept could hold it. A man at the edge of the earth, a lover already gone, a step into black because turning around was never on the table. That is album-rock language, the kind this station was built to play. If you want the rest of the catalog, the road dates, and the new Texas material, the band keeps house at their official site, thecoldstares.com. The day-to-day lives on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the long discography and the press trail, the fan-side shelves worth bookmarking are the Wikipedia entry and the Discogs artist page. And when you want the next deep cut without the commercials, you already know where you are: The Zoo. Stay with it. The edge of the earth is a fine place for a guitar solo.