“Humans,” as Richard summed it up when we spoke last week as Filter’s tour was passing through Florida. “Human beings and our failure to just get how precious and amazing this little planet is. And you know, I see the world for what it is. I see a bunch of religious fanatics on both sides clinging to this incredible security blanket.”

“There’s so many amazing things we’ve seen with like the Hubble space telescope that all lead back to like, wow, Earth is precious. And every planet they find is a huge gas giant that’s close to the star. They’ve only found a couple of planets that are about the same size as Earth. And look at that, they’re discovering planets around all the closest stars to us. Every single star has a planet around it, they’re finding, and it’s like wow, so Earth is like this really special place… you find these amazing things, and then you hear about some lady that just fed her two year old a joint.”

The new album, which Richard describes as his “scream in the night,” kicks off with a focus on the Iraq war. The lead track and first single, Soldiers of Misfortune, is about a twenty-two year old friend of the band who signed up for the reserves in 1998 in the hopes of paying for college but ended up getting shipped to Baghdad and killed in action. “All he wanted to do was get a college education and study computers. Now he’s dead. That’s what this fucking war’s about, and our whore-like, whore-like addition to oil. We should have put a hundred billion dollars into a solar farm in the Mohave desert.”

Filter has another personal connection to the war. Frank Cavanagh, who played bass guitar for Filter for seven years, is now Sergeant Cavanagh and is shipping out to Iraq on May 18th. The band recently performed in Kuwait as part of Operation MySpace, a concert for the troops, during which Cavanagh briefly reunited with the band for a performance of Filter’s mega-hit Hey Man Nice Shot. But his status as a former rock star won’t prevent him from being exposed to the same dangers as any other solider on active duty.

“I worry about Frank,” Richard said. “He comes from a military family and he believes in what he’s doing, and he’s there for his brothers and sisters in the military. It’s very family-oriented. He believes in his brothers and sisters. He loves the military. He’s married to the military. And the reality is, when I went away and joined Army of Anyone [a recent collaboration with Dean and Robert DeLeo of Stone Temple Pilots], he literally joined the army.”

“I like collecting Star Wars shit. He loves the military. He plays Medal of Honor and watches Saving Private Ryan. It was like Saving Private Ryan was on all the time on our bus.”

Another potential single entitled The Wake is based on the four years Richard spent living in a basement apartment in Chicago. “Down here the saints turn mean,” as he puts it. “Finding yourself in a basement in a dark place, and kind of finding happiness in there somehow, and being totally okay with killing the day,” he says in reference to the new song Kill The Day. “Sometimes when humans aren’t killing each other, sometimes they’re killing themselves and we’re our own worst enemies. And there’s some of that on this record as well.”

“It’s like Vader, to use a Star Wars analogy. He really was trying to do the right thing. He turned into Darth Vader because he was just making a huge mistake trying to save Padme. But he ended up killing Padme. I think Bush actually really thought, like, ‘this’ll solve all our problems. This’ll be hailed as one of the greatest things ever!’”

But just as the 2000 mainstream hit Take A Picture demonstrated that Filter’s music can be every bit as pretty as it is defiant, the new album has its share of toned-down moments as well. “I expect the Filter audience to be as eclectic as me,” Richard says of Cold and the other lower-key songs. “We’ve been criticized by people for being too hard to fucking pigeonhole. They’re like, well, we don’t know what to call Filter. Is it metal? Is it rock? Is it industrial?”

“I listen to Radiohead, I listen to the Deftones, I listen to Neil Diamond, I listen to Pantera. I’m eclectic, and so the sounds that I create with this band is gonna be the same kind of thing.”

Anthems For The Damned, despite its name and despite appearances, isn’t all about fatalism, however. “The record is negative, and it looks negative, but there’s a lot of optimism deep in there,” Richard cautions. “Humans are fantastic, amazing creatures. You wanna be a fucking patriot, go solar. That’s the message of this record.”