Two years after the release of his first album Love or Hatred, Communications major Christian Gisondi has released a new single, “Average Psycho,” as a prelude to his soon-to-be-released album of the same name.

The Average Psycho album is part of the metal music genre, Gisondi says it will be much darker and more experimental than Love or Hatred. He also says there is a song in it for everyone, however.

“Strap in, because it’s heavy. Not in a bad way, though, just enough,” Gisondi said.

The name “Average Psycho” came from Gisondi’s fondness of having his songs have contradictions in their titles. After sending a first recording of the song to his guitarist for review, he said that it sounded like a fight song.

So, Gisondi came up with aggressive lyrics to match the theme and a backstory behind it.

“I came up with this idea of a guy, who’s in the bar and someone is screwing with him because he’s bigger than him, but doesn’t realize that even though he might seem average, he’s a psycho,” Gisondi said. “They underestimate him, it’s a story about “it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

The song was also inspired by Gisondi’s childhood desire to create a song to empower people who have been bullied.

“There are certain ways to create [an empowering song],” Gisondi said. “One way is just creating a really sappy ‘have confidence’ kind of song, but I wanted [‘Average Psycho’] to be a bad-ass metal song about standing up for yourself.”

The artwork for the album cover of Average Psycho features a person in an electric chair, the idea came to Gisondi during Dr. Katherine Fink’s Digital Storytelling class, whose main focus is Sing Sing prison.

Gisondi also plans to incorporate a prison theme in a future music video for the song.

“Talking about Sing Sing and dark tourism is kind of what inspired the idea, that things might appear a certain way on the outside, but there is really an untold story within everybody and everything,” Gisondi said.

“Average Psycho” received a crowd review of eight out of ten on ReverbNation, meaning it will be on the website’s front page in the future, according to Gisondi.

The reason it has taken Gisondi two years to create another song after Love or Hatred’s release in 2015 was because he was having difficulty creating ideas, however, he says he is now back in the mindset to produce music.

“Most bands usually wait about two years between albums,” Gisondi said. “It takes a while because what happens to me is I’ll get into a mood where I’ll write like five songs and then I’ll stop for a few weeks and then I’ll go back to writing. For a while, I was having trouble getting good ideas down, but now it seems like I’m back in that mindset.”

“Average Psycho” has been released on ReverbNation, YouTube, iTunes, and Spotify.

Gisondi plans to release the rest of the album in the summer of this year.