Released on Nuclear Blast the day before a headline night at Helsinki's Ice Hall, this twelfth album from the Finnish industrial metal group arrives at a point where the band's stage reputation carries much of the weight. The studio versions keep that urgency: guitars and keyboards sit close and loud, and the two vocalists trade lines over the grooviest passages.
Entheos arrive at their fourth album on Metal Blade with a question hanging over it: how far can a band drift from the technical death metal that built its name before it stops sounding like itself? Empty on the Inside leans into the alternative end of the spectrum. "Golden Crown" opens on a clean, gothic-tinged figure, then drops into downtuned djent chugging with a sharp, plucked bass. Chaney Crabb's clean singing now occupies the centre of many songs rather than serving as contrast, and the dry, close mix gives the record a rawer, 90s industrial edge.
Hope holds its bleakest material in the same frame as its brightest melodies. The lyrics turn toward the cost of ambition, the appetite for power, and a society losing its capacity for empathy, yet the arrangements keep lifting toward daylight. Guitar figures and keyboard lines rise just as the darker passages gather, so the listener hears the two pulling against each other rather than settling into one mood.
Embryectomy are in no rush on Vitriolic Baptism, and the record sets that patience against an appetite for damage. The riffs are built to churn and sink rather than blur past at speed. A chord is held until its weight settles into the room, and the groove that results is hypnotic, pulling you forward even as it flattens you. The same hands keep reaching for the cruelest option available, though. Breakdowns arrive like falling masonry, and the gurgling, bellowing vocals sound less like singing than like something being dragged up from under the floor.
Seventh in sequence, "Raise the Raven Banner" is where Echoes of a Forlorn Land stops glancing back at the band's deathcore past. Cold blackened blasting gives way to sinister, mid-paced grooves, with melodic lines riding above a rhythm that never loosens. Halfway through, the tempo pulls back hard, and the slower stretch makes the track feel more threatening than its speed earlier suggested.
Glasswaves came up through singles, an EP and touring, and this debut is where the Rochester trio stops hedging. The metalcore weight that sat at the edges of their earlier work now sets the terms, though dark pop and electronics stay in the frame. What falls away is the feel of a genre sampler. What remains is a digital gloss laid over blunt, physical heaviness.
Four years after its last full-length, Polyphia bring their fifth album to Rise, a label whose roster leans heavy, and the record sounds like it was built for that company. The low end is pushed hard, bass hits clip at their edges, and the drums are sampled or programmed rather than tracked in a room. Henson and LePage still trade riffs, but they often sit beneath thick distortion, so the leads arrive as bright flashes instead of the centre of every bar.
Two appetites share the same frame on this debut: the urge to flatten the listener and the pull toward something softer. Tremolo picking and jagged, snapping riffs keep the tempo near a sprint, and the blasts arrive so often they start to feel like weather. Then the record cracks open. A violin and viola line rises out of the din, a piano phrase drifts in once the storm has passed, and the drumming sometimes loosens into a jazz-tinged swing beneath the thrash.
The opener rolls in with a dense, low-slung guitar tone, and the riffs seem to sit on the floor of the mix rather than above it. Two vocal lines push against each other: a rasping bark and a clean line that rises out of it. The rhythm section keeps a steady, unhurried churn, leaving each riff room to ring before the next one arrives. Around the middle, "Syzygy" strips away all distortion and lets clean guitars hang over a moving, airy bed of sound, a deliberate reset before "Jackal" turns theatrical, shifting shape from one passage to the next.
Bass figures run through filters until their edges blur, and synth lines hover instead of striking, so the opening stretch sits inside a haze that the arrangements keep for much of the runtime. Grian Chatten's voice stays close and slightly reverberant on top, while the drums hold a repetitive, forward-leaning pulse that borrows from older krautrock grooves without imitating them. Strings recur across the tracklist and give the band a scale its guitars rarely reached. Chatten recorded his vocals separately in a homemade booth, and that nearness carries into the mix.
Tungl is a moody, carefully made record whose ideas run thinner than its atmosphere. Eivør's voice carries nearly every turn, and the production is built to give it room: pulsing synth bass, low processional drums, and the occasional guitar that cuts through the murk.
"The Hour Grows Late" is the eight-minute hinge of the record, and it plays more like a suite than a single. It opens low and unhurried, a figure circling itself until the guitars gather and the tempo tightens into a churning passage where tremolo lines climb and fall away. A guest from Amorphis then takes over with a broad, open clean voice, and the death vocals return rawer than usual, as if the singer has been pushed past his comfort zone. Soft gives way to hard, hard to folk-tinged calm, and back again, with no section lingering long enough to become a riff you could carry out of the room.
Autosmile is the strongest record Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak have made, though it stops short of the greatness its best passages hint at. Eleven songs run to about forty minutes, and the sequencing does real work: the eerie flute and fingerpicked guitar of "Bird" give way to the hazy, synth-dusted "Love in the Dark," and the pair keep shifting moods so no feeling settles for long. Much of it was tracked at home, yet the arrangements are denser than that suggests, with cello and violin beside clarinet, tambourine, and electric guitar that flares toward prog.
"A Moonlit Tryst" is the shortest cut on the record and the easiest place to hear how the band builds a song. It starts with bare acoustic strings and the hush of a night outdoors, quiet enough that the first raw vocal howl hits like a door thrown open. The middle section sinks into a funeral crawl, colder and more menacing than anything before it, and then a return to acoustic guitar leads the song back toward a melody that nearly bounces. The handoffs are smooth enough that control of dynamics becomes the real subject of the track.
O is the sharper of the two records this duo has made, and the reason is how it handles time. Six pieces run close to thirty-five minutes, and Frank Rosaly lets a hand-drum figure hold long enough to shift under the listener's ear. His drumming works less as a clock than as ground that tilts, with loose, overlapping pulses drawn from bomba, plena, rumba and cumbia without settling into any one of them.