If you couldn’t tell from the title of Badflower‘s upcoming album This Is How the World Ends, frontman Josh Katz was very much influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s really observational,” Katz tells ABC Audio of the record. “It’s such a pandemic album, [that’s] the only way I can describe it.”

Faced with limited social options over the past year-and-a-half — “I already have no social life, and I especially had no social life [during quarantine],” he quips — Katz turned to the same place many of the rest of us did: the internet.

“I just took to the internet and started observing and trying to understand these characters who I was so, so far away from who display such a different version of themselves on the internet than they do in real life,” he explains.

That then led to “researching and obsessing,” which Katz says became a “big part” of the album. Then, however, things took an introspective turn.

“[I was] trying to understand who I am in this world,” Katz shares. “Am I trying to make the world a better place, or am I just serving myself? What’s my role in all that, what should I be doing?…That was my perspective through a lot of this stuff.”

This Is How the World Ends, the sophomore follow-up to 2019’s OK, I’m Sick, arrives this Friday. It includes the previously released singles “Don’t Hate Me” and “Family.”