No matter how far Suicide Silence run, they’ll always be in the shadow of two of their own albums. The first one’s The Cleansing: their 2007 debut that made deathcore a legitimate force. The other is 2017’s self-titled disaster, which crashed into a nu metal nadir so hard that it inspired more memes than it did defenders.
Mercifully, 2020 comeback Become The Hunter was nearer to the former than the latter. The wounds inflicted by all the squeaking vocals and Deftones mimicry were bandaged by good ol’-fashioned breakdowns and blasts. Sure, the result of such throwbacks wasn’t exactly a mind-shattering album, but it had the potential to lay the track for a rejuvenation they’ve needed since former vocalist Mitch Lucker sadly passed.
Remember… You Must Die springboards off of this reignited momentum by… doing the exact same thing. Make no mistake: if you want to wolf down bread-and-butter deathcore, Suicide Silence’s seventh album will be the sweetest feast you’ve had in some time.
Kill Forever is as incessantly brutal as its title, drums pummelling at lightspeed beneath Cannibal Corpse-flavoured guitars and Eddie Hermida hissing ‘Skin will boil!’. God Be Damned’s tremolo picking is as blackened as chargrilled chicken, before the riff that opens Alter Of Self chugs so ominously that you can practically see the crowd-killers warming up.
This is all well and good, tried and true, until you remember… this is fucking Suicide Silence! The masterminds behind The Cleansing should be at least a year ahead of everybody else, yet they’ve been swept away by Whitechapel and even newcomers Lorna Shore in the ‘taking deathcore to rad new places’ stakes.
If they can’t drive in new directions without flinging themselves off a cliff, this lot may end up in the back seat of the scene they popularised.
Remember... You Must Die is out March 17 via Century Media
