This is the 10th album from this long-running hardcore band whose origins trace back to Buried Alive from the late 90s. They deliver what you expect from this brand of hardcore. They are in your face and more on the metallic side, which makes plenty of sense considering their origins and influences. Even with the metallic elements the guitar riffs embrace, the dominant presence of gang vocals and attitude of the lead vocal are clearly hardcore, in fact, more hardcore than most bands these days. The title track" sets the tone with a more groove-driven riff than the opening track. You can hear this in the safety of your home and know this would be a brutal pit.
The songs are concise one-two punches. They rarely venture over three minutes. They race ahead of themselves with the rapid-fire anger that comes at you in" Promised Only Lies," which hits peak form when it hits a powerful gallop."Destruction of My Soul" shows plenty of thrash influence, you have to guess the most notable one would be Slayer, though some "Master of Puppets" like chugging can also be heard. An impressive bass line leads the way into "Fear the Panic." It has more of a Cro-Mags feel. This works for me since the Cro-Mags are one of my favorite classic hardcore bands.
The faster punk undercurrent of hardcore takes over on the song "Death of Hope". It does finds it's way into one cool riff, but cool riffs alone does not a good song make, is our mantra here. Things take an odd hip-hop turn for the intro of "The Beauty in the Losses." Jay Peta from Mindforce lends his voice to this one. "A Deeper Struggle" lives more off the increased tempo until the breakdown riff, which is a little true to the formula for the genre. The same can be said for " To Hurt the Most". The last song finds the vocalists from God's Hate and King Nine chiming in. Overall, while they typically play it pretty straight up by the book hardcore, they do it well and care about songwriting as most of the songs have their own identity, and is what you want from a hardcore album, so I will give this a 9.5
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