Review
"Vermin" opens the record on a squat, chugging breakdown with a trap drum pattern running underneath, so the low end seems to hit from two directions at once. Jakob Harris's guttural growl comes in first, then Gavin Mistry's rapping slides over it, and the two trade lines in a tight exchange that sharpens the track instead of loosening it. Blast-beat black metal and metalcore chugging swap places across the album, often mid-phrase, and those transitions carry more momentum than any single riff.
The production is the record's weak point. Everything is buffed to a high gloss, the guitars are packed into one dense wall, and the bass disappears, which blunts some of the weight the writing is reaching for. The vocal patterns also settle faster than the arrangements around them, so several songs hold their shape longer than their ideas do.
Then comes "Slow," a two-minute acoustic instrumental that strips away voices and distortion. It is a bare, odd moment on a record built to hit, and it breaks the momentum in the back half. Even so, the core idea, blackened death fused with trap-inflected rap and electronic haze, holds across all eleven songs. This is a debut from a band still locating its edges, uneven in places but more distinct than its flaws suggest.
