Music teaches us many lessons but the lesson which possibly resounds the hardest is that nothing good can last. We watch celebrated careers wither away into money-grabbing husks on a yearly basis. The music lives on but the people who made it, mortals all, die and fade away. Entire genres…
Trivium have had a colorful career. From blowing up in 2005 with their sophomore release Ascendancy to creating a widely beloved genre-defying masterpiece in Shogun, they’ve known various heights of acclaim. In Waves is also generally quite well-lived, but then things got a bit shakier. They went through various drummers, frontman Matt Heafy had problems with his voice, and some of their albums weren’t as widely appealing as their older work. To some, this might sound like the story of a band past their prime. That’s not necessarily true, as none of their albums in this period were bad per se, but the reception from the fans was more mixed. Every new album would get compared to heights of previous releases.
All of that changed in 2017; things took a turn. With the release of The Sin And The Sentence everything seemed to align and bring the band to new heights. They found a new drummer that elevated their sound in Alex Bent, they found a new sound that elevated their recent trajectory, and Matt’s Twitch streaming career took off, growing the band’s audience in new ways. Of course, with every major milestone album in a band’s career, one question lingers: What happens next?
Quadra is Sepultura’s best album since Roots (1996). That might seem like a trite assessment, since the same has often been said about each of their albums since at least Kairos (2011), and has also arguably been true of all of their albums since Roorback (2003). Nevertheless, the fact remains…
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That there has been quite the buzz around Liverpudlian quintet Loathe since their debut EP, Prepare Consume Proceed, dropped in 2016 makes the existence of skeptics and detractors as inevitable as a rabid and dedicated fanbase. Their first full-length, The…
Surely everyone who has ever picked up a guitar, microphone, or drumstick has fantasised about creating an album revered as a bona fide, epoch-defining classic. The dream of having a collection of songs that are still spoken about in hushed, reverent tones more than two decades after their release is…
We might as well address the elephant in the room right off the bat, as urban dictionary culture has opened an unfortunate path for readers’ minds to travel down during recent years. Long before the acronym THOT brought a cruder insinuation to the table, a Belgian band came together around…
The Load In August may have been a relatively quiet month in terms of the volume of events I attended, but there can be no doubt that the quality has been exceptionally high. Having already spoken at length about Radar festival in my last column, I only have three more…
Ah yes, mono no aware! This Japanese literary term has been a subject of fascination in the West for a few decades now and has even seen some attention from metal. This fascination is understandable; the subtle and complex term evokes a wide array of sensations, from existential dread through…
Originally, this post started out as a Stepping Stone, after I bought a cheap used copy of Slipknot at a local record store and proceeded to tumble down the nostalgia rabbit hole. But given that this year marks the album’s 20th anniversary, I felt like it deserved the proper Heavy…
VOLA’s album from 2016, Inmazes, had the complicated pleasure of being a hit with a very specific subsection of the metal community. Far from the band’s first list, it was nonetheless their first release which put them on the map of the progressive metal scene. In fact, it sounded almost engineered…
