Cochise

If the previous song was Audioslave at their most contemplative, this one is them arriving like a controlled explosion. The opening riff is a swagger — not aggressive exactly, but deeply, unapologetically confident, Morello deploying tone and rhythm in a way that sounds like nothing else in rock's catalog because it simply isn't built like anything else. The groove underneath is hypnotic, almost tribal, locking into a pattern that pulls the body before the mind catches up. Cornell's vocal here has no tenderness — it's pure force, a performance that treats the throat as an instrument of pressure rather than melody, pushing sounds into shapes that feel almost physical. The song's lyrical DNA draws from the story of Cochise, the Apache leader who resisted forced relocation with absolute determination — and that spirit animates every bar: dignity, defiance, the refusal to be moved. Sonically, it sits at the intersection of hard rock and something harder to name, with funk-adjacent rhythmic sensibility buried beneath the noise. Audioslave had to establish themselves as something other than their component parts, and this song was their clearest declaration that they were something genuinely new rather than a supergroup compromise. It belongs to gym sets, to the moment before something difficult you've already decided you're going to do, to any situation requiring the audacity to simply not back down.