As the album title suggests, Brain Paint is abundant with endless colour. It’s a glowing combination of prog and post-rock, leaving you humming its instrumentals non-stop. Launching at light speed with the title track like And So I Watch You From Afar with a cape on and a rocket strapped to its back, Maebe deliver a hook to ensnare you immediately before a short, tense build soon lifts off into a carnival of guitars driven by the surging drums of Nicholas Appelgren. Three guitars mean thrice the fun as the album’s grandiose entrance is a flag firmly planted in optimistic ground, as ‘lower case song title’ sees all three perform a glittering math rock routine which culminates in a post-rock firework display with each layer more glorious than the last until it ends in an instant.
As proved here, Maebe are one of the most dynamic entries in the UK’s thriving instrumental music scene, as their elegant combination forms a marriage of vigorous life. Every riff ricocheting off the synapse walls to create a fresh rush of light is a welcome departure from the more prominent themes of ominous melancholy and catharsis in the genre. Its theatrical mood is infectious, and its slower moments in ‘Young Lungs’ don’t feel dour and feel capable of taking off into Brain Paint numerous fiery impulses. It has the bounce of classic Alpha Male Tea Party in its bones, so the mix being handled by Tom Peters feels heaven-sent. The masters being handled by Stephen Kerrison mean this is another album crafted by the duo alongside Bicurious and The Last Vinci.
While still a fairly recent band, having released their first musical output roughly a decade ago now, Swedish progressive metallers Karmanjakah were quick to find their own sound and identity within their niche of progressive heavy music. Most notably with their 2021 debut album A Book About Itself which combined accessible melody with challenging technicality and heaviness, an assemblage they would further refine in 2023 with their Ancient Skills EP, marking even more of a turning point in the trajectory of their style where heaviness, technicality, feel and soothing soundscapes became undiscernable from each other, forming one single cohesive sound and overall vision unlike anything else despite some of its original roots being crystal clear.
Diamond Morning is very much a natural next step forward following the latest iteration of the sound Karmanjakah had presented with Ancient Skills, and it sees them make themselves even more at home within this little corner of heaven they have carved out amidst a niche that thrives in either searching for utmost sonic extremity or jarringly dense abstraction.
Despite constant shifts in tempo, tone and melody, Koyo never lose sight of the bigger picture on Barely Here. Every track feels connected, flowing seamlessly into the next with a level of cohesion that makes the album feel less like a collection of songs and more like a fully realised body of work. In an era dominated by playlist culture and isolated singles, Barely Here feels like an album in the truest sense of the word, immersive, intentional and impossible to skip.
Produced, engineered and mixed by longtime collaborator Jon Markson, whose work with Drug Church, The Story So Far and Drain has helped define modern melodic hardcore, the record feels instinctive rather than overworked. There’s a confidence throughout Barely Here that comes from a band fully understanding who they are and refining their strengths instead of reinventing themselves for the sake of evolution.
The album opens cinematically with the sound of a telephone dialling on the title track, immediately throwing the listener into the middle of a conversation before a single lyric fully lands. “What more is there to say?” becomes both a hook and a thematic statement, cleverly framing emotional distance through the imagery of a disconnected call. It’s intimate, melancholic and sets the emotional tone perfectly.
‘Jet Stream Wish’ wastes no time grabbing hold, opening with a riff that feels tailor-made for packed-out venues and screamed-back choruses. The track balances melancholic melodies with bursts of punk-driven percussion, particularly during the explosive pre-chorus. Even in its heavier moments, the melody constantly evolves, giving the song a restless momentum that never lets up.
“We just refuse to become boring,” declares Atreyu frontman Brandon Saller, holding an album so dull it could have real potential as a sleep aid. “We’re trying to do what isn’t being done” declares Atreyu frontman Brandon Saller, waving an album of recycled riffs and choruses so generic and formulaic it would make the AI slop bucket blush. “It’s our heaviest, most metal record we’ve made, but it’s also the biggest musical journey we’ve taken in years” declares Atreyu frontman Brandon Saller, aggressively chasing us brandishing an album stuffed with riffs that wouldn’t frighten a toddler and a musical journey on the scale of a leisurely stroll to the supermarket.
The opening track is titled ‘The End Is Not The End’ and if there’s any truth in that, we are in very serious trouble. If we don’t get to stop listening after these 13 tracks then people are going to be in immediate mortal danger. Metalcore Groundhog Day is not what we signed up for. Second track ‘Dead’ works as a sort of themed bingo card for all the reasons not to listen to this band. The lyrical work is juvenile and lazy to the point that we’re surprised not to see ChatGPT or Grok credited as co-writers. After a decades-long career and global success we really hoped that Atreyu might have either cheered up a bit or outgrown their high-school level vocabulary and emotional depth, but there’s little evidence of that here and we’re even treated to a theatrical tough-guy spoken word breakdown to cement our conviction that they stopped maturing when they sprouted their first chin hair.
Regardless of how you look at it, there’s no denying things have become a little bit more extreme as of late. Be it the style of popular music consumption or political rhetoric (see hardcore bands playing arenas and the bleak prediction polls regarding today’s local elections), everything has felt very intense, uncertain and darkly dubious recently. Thankfully for those in dire need of something stable and reliable, Canadian punk rockers The Flatliners are back with a new record that’s a throwback to those long-missed days when everything felt safe and certain.
The seventh LP from the Oratorio punks, the aptly titled Cold World is one of those increasingly rare records that’s more or less exactly what you expect it to be. There are no surprises here, no left-field creative decisions, no shoehorned genre gimmickry; just an expected continuation of the band’s throaty, aged-denim-jacket-scented sound. Which, to confirm, is both something that feels directly intentional and something we mean in the most complimentary way possible. Here, The Flatliners offer a collection of feel-good shout-alongs that feel blissfully detached from the fire and turmoil of modern living. At least on a surface level, anyway.
Riding on the back of yet more massively successful tours, the permafrost ridden riffs of Frozen Soul return to stamp your face in for 11 succinct tracks that distill down everything the band do well. But unfortunately, there isn’t really anything new here. That’s not to say it’s bad, the tracks are well constructed romps through triplet driven breakdowns, tight drum work and harsh vocals that never falter, but it can’t help but leave you wanting more (maybe that’s the point) from the Texas natives as the same tracks that have been held in such high regard from their previous releases.
The best thing about No Place Of Warmth is the kind of comforting psychological effect that comes from knowing where the songs are going next, there are no challenging surprises or weird little segways into other sub-genres. Frozen Soul do what they do and they do it really well. Backed up by their increasingly beefy live show, these songs will no doubt go down an absolute storm with any crowd of battle jacket-acquainted metal heads. And they should, they’re well put together, albeit a little tropey at times. Everything is now fine-tuned, the drums hit hard with each strike, the guitars have that delightful balance between pure dirt and articulation, meaning you can hear every string hit, and the vocals are sufficiently grating and ice-encased to complement everything else that’s going on here.
