Killer Be Killed released Reluctant Hero on November 20, 2020, through Nuclear Blast. Their second studio album was the first to feature Converge drummer Ben Koller, joining guitarists and vocalists Greg Puciato and Max Cavalera and bassist and vocalist Troy Sanders. With three singers sharing the songs, the follow-up to their 2014 debut gave each musician room to move between leading a track and supporting someone else.
“Dream Gone Bad” made that exchange central to its arrangement, moving between melodic singing and harsher vocals. Sanders said in Nuclear Blast’s announcement that he and Cavalera had started the song before the full band developed it together. The band introduced it ahead of the album with an official performance video.
Koller had already played with Killer Be Killed in Australia in 2015. Those shows helped convince the musicians to continue beyond their debut, even with the demands of their other bands. The return took time, but the lineup had a shared experience to build on before it entered the studio.
Writing meant finding stretches when all four could meet. Puciato told Metal1.info in a November 2020 interview that they gathered in Phoenix for roughly a week at a time, arriving with ideas and developing others from scratch. They waited until they felt ready to record. With Josh Wilbur producing, the instrumental recording was completed in April and May 2019; Puciato recorded his vocals in January 2020. The album’s release during the pandemic came after a writing and recording process that had been underway long before it.
During recording, the musicians shared a rented house. Puciato told Apple Music that they chose that arrangement over separate hotel rooms, making breakfast, studio sessions and downtime part of their time together.
The shared vocal setup also changed how the musicians treated authorship. Sanders told Kerrang!, “Who wrote the lyrics doesn’t matter in terms of who gets to sing them.” A member could write a passage without reserving the microphone for himself. For Puciato, that freedom extended to concentrating on guitar, something he explained in the Metal1.info interview. He could work on an instrumental part without also having to think through every vocal.
That flexibility helped finish material that had been waiting for years. In his Apple Music interview, Puciato described beginning “From a Crowded Wound” in 2010 and considering it for his solo work. He had the musical framework, but the vocals weren’t coming together, and he didn’t want to force them. Writing with Cavalera’s and Sanders’ voices in mind finally gave him a way forward. Their contrasting approaches became part of the composition itself. He described imagining their voices while writing their sections, treating the available singers as distinct characters he could write for.
The closing title track gave the collaboration a more personal weight. In a December 2020 Metal Hammer interview, Sanders recalled working on lyrics about Nick John, his friend and longtime manager, who had died of pancreatic cancer. During that first draft, he learned that an extended family member had also died after living with cancer. The relative had described himself as a reluctant warrior, a phrase Sanders connected with facing a fight nobody had chosen. He proposed “Reluctant Hero” as the song’s title, and the other musicians agreed. A few days later, they suggested giving the album the same name.
