Candy : "It's Inside You"

 

This band's 2022 album "Heaven is Here"  took the number two spot on our Top 10 Extreme Metal Albums list of the year, and tenth on the best overall Metal list of the year. I have been looking forward to this one and expectations are high.  Aaron Melnick of Integrity lends his guitar to what I assume to be the solo on "Short Circut" and it only makes sense as the hard-core grind of the song, carries the same raw sludge-like tone Integrity uses, making their influence on this band more apparent. That is not to say this is almost trying to capture the hardcore sounds of the 90s, the band continues to be very forward-thinking, but those influences abound from different angles.

Justice Tripp of Trapped Under Ice lends his voice to "You Will Never Get Me", a song that is almost one crushing breakdown laced with industrial hints in an almost nu-metal fashion. The post-millennial hard-core continues with David Gagliardi of Trash Talk yelling along with them on the title track that hits a very Ministry-influenced syncopation. They marry these sounds in a manner that carries perhaps even more metallic fury than when Code Orange dabbled in similar sonics. 'Love Like Snow" goes in a more electronic direction without compromising the album's narrative. 

"Dehumanize Me" kicks you in the face with equal lyrical and metallic fury.  "Faith 91" is brutal but also has a catchy groove, other metal-core bands need to take notes with this album. They do abandon restraint at times and blast off into hyper-fast punk explosions where they sound more like every other hard-core band, but they do redeem themselves with mean riffs that turn the dynamics back around. "Silent  Collapse' is the only song where it feels they are overindulgent in their punk rock side. I prefer it when they temper the punk energy with electronic experimentation as displayed in "Dancing to the Infinite Beat".  They take this to a further extreme on "Hypercore".  I will give this album a 9.5, a see how it grows on me, it has raised the bar for hardcore this year. I think this is closer to what I expected from the new Knocked Loose, so I hope the hype for that release doesn't overshadow what these guys are doing better. Drops June 7th on Relapse Records.  

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