'Can we ready ourselves for the outrage?' Sam Carter warned us when Architects released Whiplash last year. The lad is raging. You can sense it even as opener Elegy floats into existence via fluttering EDM. You can feel it just under one minute later as the track explodes into life, courtesy of a scything melodeath riff and a paint-stripping scream, quickly followed by a nasty, guttural roar that’s comfortably more visceral and, well, heavy than anything on 2022’s The Classic Symptoms Of A Broken Spirit. That was a great record – one where Architects distilled the ambitious experimentation of For Those That Wish To Exist into a taut, hook-laden set of arena-ready anthems – but The Sky, The Earth & All Between is a whole different animal.
Where much of the band’s recent output has traded in heartbreak, despair and existential soul-searching, The Sky..., for the most part, finds Brighton’s finest simply seething. Yes, there are still big choruses and catchy hooks abound – Elegy’s ‘Again, again, again’ refrain will stick in your head for days – but there’s a sense of raging urgency that permeates almost every nook and cranny of the album’s 42-minute runtime.
Whiplash berates tribalism and culture war madness amid beefy, mechanical riffs and smatterings of industrial noise, Sam exasperatedly asking if everyone’s done ‘fucking around’ as the world burns around us. Seeing Red takes aim at shallow fans who demand a return to old-school Architects heaviness (‘Time hasn’t frozen, why do you want me to scream?’). It’s a heavy song, packing thrashing guitars, pick-scraped riffs and a vintage ‘BLEGH!’, but it comes wrapped in glitching electronics and cheerleader chants bound to annoy the piss out of anyone insisting on a lazy victory lap of the ‘good ol’ days’.
In fact, the album is full of welcome left turns alongside those considerable slabs of all-out heaviness. Blackhole sneaks a full-blown 80s stadium rock solo in amongst juddering tech metal riffs, clattering drums and low-end bellowing; Brain Dead is scuzzy hardcore sprinkled with glitching hyper-pop, featuring a cameo from genre-splicing punks House Of Protection; Everything Ends is pure post-That’s The Spirit pop metal, featuring a guest spot from LA-based singer Amira Elfeky; the closing Chandelier is an emotionally dense burst of shimmering EDM-core.
Everything Ends isn’t the only time Bring Me The Horizon’s shadow looms large, likely because Jordan Fish is behind the production desk, bringing the same brand of glossy industrial metalcore to straight-up bangers like Judgement Day that he helped hone on last year’s excellent Poppy album.
Of course, Architects did more than most to help shape the sound and feel of modern metalcore, and on The Sky, The Earth & All Between they’ve channelled their current influences into something diverse, impactful and engaging, driven by a particularly vibrant performance from Sam, unquestionably the album’s MVP. ‘No more lies if I disappear’ he sings softly as Chandelier fades out. Hopefully Architects aren’t going anywhere for a while yet. Yes, they’re sounding angry, but they’re also sounding as vital as ever.
