Release Day Roundup 10/24/25

Top Pick

The Acacia Strain – You Are Safe From God Here (deathcore)

I was pretty sure I was done with The Acacia Strain following 2023’s double-disc drag Step into the Light / Failure Will Follow. Sure, Slow Decay was pretty good (2020), and It Comes in Waves (2019) hits a lot harder upon revisit than I remembered, but I haven't really loved anything they've done since 2012's severely underrated Death is the Only Mortal or 2013's even more underrated Above / Below EP. This means that—as important and formative as their early albums are for me—we're over a full decade since I've really connected with an Acacia Strain album, with Step into the Light / Failure Will Follow representing some serious shark-jumping with it's reheated "experiments" with gimmicky packaging and the ill-fitting sludge the band have been dabbling with for longer than they haven't at this point. But just when I though I was out, they pulled me back in...

Maybe it’s the metalcore revivalist in me, but You are Safe from God Here is the best Acacia Strain album in at least a decade—by some considerable distance. It’s telling that it largely does so by sticking closer to the band’s original beatdown metal/death-core template than they have for just as long. In fact, the album goes back even further by eschewing the bouncier, trendsetting template set by Wormwood and finding its closest comparison with rawer, and notably rowdier records like Continent (2008) and The Dead Walk (2006). The songs sound more urgent and hungrier than anything the Acacia Strain have put out in ages, while also trouncing the many downbeat deathcore bands that have sprung up since.

The lyrical themes are also much more focused here than they have been maybe anywhere else in the Acacia Strain's discography, with each song telling an unending tale of aggressive hopelessness and atheistic annihilation. A lot of these lyrics could possibly be written off as rehashes of "JFC" if they didn't so hard, every god damn time. Moreover, these misanthropically murderous, nihilistic, self-loathing lyrics are delivered with such intensity that they come across as genuinely threatening, rather than cartoonish—well, except for when Brody King and Colin Young of God's Hate show up sounding like muppets on "The Machine that Bleeds", but that is the only relief you'll find from the album's unceasing darkness.

The band still can't shape some of their most frustrating tendencies, however. While it isn't packaged as a double disc the way SitL/FWF and Wormwood were, it may as well have been with the record drawing to an obvious and very final-feeling conclusion before beginning things over with it's final two tracks—the last of which is another overlong experiment in doom excess. To be fair, the trudging "Blood Loss", featuring some suitably mournful vocals courtesy of Blackwater Holylight's Sunny Faris, is by far the best example of the form The Acacia Strain have come up with so far. even then though, it pales in comparison to Harms Way and King Witch's "Undertow", which is made far more effective by being less than four minutes long and actually being integrated into the body of its album—Hell even "Tactical Nuke" was only five and a half! As a result You Are Safe From God Here's sequencing is far less lethal than it could have been. It beats me why the whole album doesn't just open with "World Gone Cold" and end with the grinding chant of "There is no God!" that ends "Sacred Relic", with opening track "Burnt Offering" also building up and fading out only to start the process all over again on "A Call Beyond" (something the new Conjurer record is also curiously guilty of).

These minor grievances don't necessarily detract from the album, but merely frustrate in preventing it from becoming everything it could have been. As is, it is merely the best album one of the very best bands have done in a very long time, if not their entire career. I'd probably take it over The Dead Walk (2006) and ...And Life is Very Long (2002) (even if I have a serious soft spot for that long-forgotten debut) and I find myself succumbing to its incessant onslaught more and more with each listen. In time, it may just rise even further in my esteem—provided we don't let it lay absolute waste to everything first.