Helmet released Left on November 10, 2023, through earMUSIC. Their ninth studio album followed 2016’s Dead to the World, ending a seven-year gap between studio albums. Its 11 tracks included the confrontational opener “Holiday” and a closing John Coltrane cover, with the whole record running just over half an hour.
“Holiday,” the lead single released in August 2023, challenged the fascination with murderers. In a January 2024 interview with V13, frontman Page Hamilton traced it to watching murder-focused television with his sister during holiday visits. He wanted to address the attention given to killers and the desensitization to their victims. The song’s deliberately crude language was meant to make that fascination uncomfortable.
Those ideas became an album in a concentrated stretch of work. Hamilton had been finishing an orchestral commission for a high school in Memphis and said he hadn’t written a song for Left when that job was done. He placed the writing and completion of the record between February and June 2023. His notebooks supplied observations to draw from, while the deadline gave him a reason to turn them into songs. The compact running time also reflected his preference for shorter records over filling a CD.
The group making those songs had years of shared experience. Hamilton recorded with drummer Kyle Stevenson, guitarist Dan Beeman and bassist Dave Case, a quartet that had been in place since 2010. Co-producer Jim Kaufman had also worked on Size Matters, giving Hamilton another familiar collaborator. Hamilton and Stevenson developed the arrangements before recording, and the sessions left room for changes right up to the last moment.
Speaking to Full Metal Jackie in an interview published by Loudwire in December 2023, Hamilton recalled asking Stevenson for a drum solo to open “Gun Fluf” just one day before they were due to record it. Stevenson came up with the part despite the short notice. Hamilton singled out the easy working relationship with Kaufman and his bandmates as a reason the album had moved so quickly.
The song’s subject carried a much heavier weight. Hamilton told Local Spins in September 2023 that “Gun Fluf” expressed his anger over gun regulation and mass shootings. He had grown up around guns, but the deaths of children had pushed him to question the priorities surrounding their ownership. Left also marked a more open expression of his left-wing politics. He described the title as tongue-in-cheek while making clear that he was willing to talk with people who disagreed. He also described being the political outlier in a Republican family that could still discuss its differences. “I don’t have an agenda. I’m just writing songs,” he told the outlet.
“Resolution” closed the album with a connection to Hamilton’s jazz background. The piece comes from the second movement of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, which Hamilton told Full Metal Jackie he had discovered around age 19. He wanted to honor the emotional intensity he heard in Coltrane’s playing. Helmet placed its 1-minute, 43-second version at the end of Left.
