Greetings, heavy music listeners! Welcome to another installment of Heavy Side Up.
This week’s featured releases are both from new up-and-coming post-hardcore bands. Post-hardcore is one of my favourite genres and it’s been sadly neglected in this feature so far, so I’m thrilled that we’ve finally gotten some stand-out releases in the genre I can highlight!
The first is Survivors by The Horizon Line. This has already become one of my favourite albums of the year – it’s equal parts heavy and soft, full of catchy earworms, and doused in effects that give it a truly ethereal quality. The lyrics admittedly leave a bit to be desired, but they’re more than easy to overlook in favour of the album’s stronger qualities:
The second is an EP titled Trying Times, by Vouloir. It leans a little more towards melodic hardcore, but the band brings a little more experimentation to the table than one typically finds in that genre. As with the album above, this EP is bursting at the seams with atmosphere – expanding the horizons of what the genre can be without abandoning its essence – and is well worth checking out.
This week brought us a wide variety of metal (and metal-adjacent) releases. There were new albums from instrumental symphonic metal band Affinity, alternate/post-hardcore hybrid Amor, Swedish death/doom metal band Apathy Noir, 70s-inspired hard rock band Cherokee Christ, Singaporean progressive metal band Coen, English alternate/post-hardcore band Don Broco, English black metal duo Encircling Wolves, Canadian instrumental prog metal band Fearing the Hill, death metal band Genocide Pact, British one-man doom/post-metal act Gift of Blindness, experimental black metal/drone project Gnaw Thier Tongues, French alternative metal band Holophonics, German one-man experimental deathcore act I Drink My Coffee Alone, metalcore band Kill Your Name, British groove metal band Kingdom in Kaos, Italian hard rock band Lale, Swedish heavy metal band Lechery, instrumental post-rock/post-metal band Long Distance Calling, Finnish black metal act Lord of Pagathorn, French power metal band Manigance, Norwegian symphonic goth metal band Mørke, German heavy metal band Reaper’s Revenge, English heavy metal band Saxon, black metal band Spite, Mexican thrash metal band Stealing Death, British hard rock band Stuckfish, Faroe Islands-based atmospheric black/doom metal band Svartmálm, Swedish symphonic metal band Therion, Sadist frontman’s side project Trevor and the Wolves, Ukrainian black metal act Ulvegr, hardcore punk band A Vulture Wake, long-running heavy metal band W.A.S.P., metalcore band We Exist Even Dead, progressive death metal/metalcore band When Forever Ends, and deathcore band Xenobiotic.
As far as EPs go, this was a big week for metalcore and deathcore on that front. We had releases from Australian experimental metalcore band Aura Animi, metalcore band Awaiting the Lullaby, post-hardcore band Davlin, deathcore band Dealey Plaza, post-hardcore band Differences, metalcore band Heists, metalcore band A Moment in Pompeii, Russian one-man black metal project North Black, metalcore band Pagans, British power metal band Skyward, and Roman electronic metalcore band Within the Nova. There was also a split EP by post-hardcore bands Joliette & Frameworks.
Lastly, just highlighting a release from last month that slipped under my radar (and another genre I’ve sadly not given much time to in these features so far) – the debut album from a hard rock band called Oddnote. It’s proven to be quite the enjoyable listen, and is recommended for fans of Queens of the Stone Age and similar bands.
So, what have you been rocking out to?
BONUS QUESTION OF THE WEEK: How have your tastes in heavy music changed since you’ve been listening to it?