Be it the gnarled, forward-thinking onslaught of While She Sleeps, Bury Tomorrow’s simple but stunningly effective anthemia or this year’s heart-warmingly resurgent return of Killswitch Engage, it’s been made abundantly clear that metalcore is far from the spent force that it seemed to be as recently as three or four years ago.
It’s difficult to gauge how well St Louis, Missouri five-piece Tear Out The Heart would have fared during the genre’s early 00s heyday, particularly when it became flooded with unjustly successful also-rans, but with the bar raised once again as of late, there’s no room for dicking about.
As it happens, TOTH tick plenty of necessary boxes – big grooves and extremely catchy melodies – while also ticking a few typically tedious ones – sickly sweet clean vocals and run-of-the-mill breakdowns being thrown down as and when expected. When they hit big, tracks like Dead By Dawn, Violence and Undead Anthem hit fucking big (although please let that last title be tongue-in-cheek), but there’s too much sugary stuff to make this a truly convincing or standout effort.
