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Danny Elfman delivers his first solo album in thirty-seven years, titled Big Mess. Clocking in at 18 tracks, the sprawling, ambitious double album finds the Grammy and Emmy Award-winning composer breaking bold new ground as both a writer and a performer, drawing on a dystopian palette of distorted electric guitars, industrial synthesizers and orchestra in an effort to exorcise the demons brought about by four years of creeping fascism and civil rot. He is joined on the album by drummer Josh Freese (Devo, Wheezer, The Vandals), bassist Stu Brooks (Dub Trio, Lady Gaga, Lauryn Hill), and guitarists Robin Finck (Nine Inch Nails, Guns N' Roses) and Nili Brosh (Tony MacAlpine, Paul Gilbert).

The songs on Big Mess combine both harmonically complex arrangements and simple high energy driving music with biting, acerbic wit as they reckon with the chaos and confusion of the modern world. "2020 was an intense year, to say the very least," Elfman says. And while the anger, frustration, and isolation of it all is palpable in his delivery, Big Mess is about more than simply blowing off steam. In making the space to truly sit with his emotions and write without limitations, Elfman achieved a kind of artistic liberation on the record that had been eluding him for decades, rediscovering his voice and reinventing himself all at once in the process.

Elfman isn't shy about using that voice to share his mind, either. Big Mess is an often explicitly political record – "Choose Your Side", "Serious Ground" and "Sorry" all anchor themselves in the political intensity of our times. Even a reworked Oingo Boingo song, "Insects", transforms itself into a meditation on the greed and sickness of the American ruling class – but Big Mess is also a deeply personal work, with songs like the droning "In Time", the haunting "We Belong", and feverish "Everybody Loves You" revealing more of Danny Elfman than we've heard at any stage of his remarkably eclectic career.

The album artwork was also created by Sarah Sitkin from a series of 3-D body scans and designed and art directed by Berit Gwendolyn Gilma.