There’s just something so fucking great that sort of gets released in my mind whenever I hear a really well-done melodic death metal record. It’s like an energy behind the music; the feeling of the artists behind the music is so palpable that you feel like you could grab it in your hand. I really can’t place what exactly it is—maybe it’s the vocals, or the fucking great riffs, but it’s just…awesome. I remember listening to Arch Enemy’s “Burning Angel” and Arsis’s first album for the first time and feeling like that.
Obviously, Finland’s The Hypothesis is melodeath—really well-done melodeath for a band that just released their debut album Origin this year. Like any good melodic death metal act, The Hypothesis is able to merge heavy, djent-inspired guitar work and vicious vocals with a moving spirit. While some bands—Arch Enemy comes to my mind first and foremost—use their guitars to make the “melodic” element present, The Hypothesis takes the Children of Bodom route and uses synthesizers for that element, making it sometimes feel like a really, really evil power metal album, and other times giving it an almost trance-like feel, as if the band is about to break out some Molly. (Don’t worry, though; those trance moments dovetail really well with the rest of it; there’s no single moment of Origin that doesn’t sound it belongs on a metal album.) There moments, though, where the guitar takes a front seat and offers some blistering beauty in the form of some masterful sweep-picking.
Unlike CoB, though, The Hypothesis is clearly melodic death metal. Singer Antti Seppälä’s voice is clearly in that middle-to-low territory of growling, offering a throat-shredding voice that also has a great amount of clarity to it—none of that high shrieking stuff that Alexi Laiho is known for. There are even some moment of clean singing that come out really well.
So, if you want some really well-done melodeath that feels like it’s been lightly dipped in some power metal influences, check out The Hypothesis; you won’t be disappointed.