Empty Hands mostly plays it safe, but when it ventures beyond expectations, it truly excels. The closing and title track, “Empty Hands,” is a prime example—it’s absolutely brutal, possibly the heaviest song Poppy has ever recorded, and it fucking rips. The blast beats and guitar chugs evoke early Suicide Silence and grindcore bands from the 2000s and early 2010s, while her unclean vocals shred through you like a cheese grater. She manages to slide a clean section in, providing a brief respite before chaos resumes. There’s also an incredibly heavy double-kick section around the 2:30 mark before launching into a nice stank-face-inducing breakdown that I absolutely love. Vocally, Poppy channels the ferocity of bands like Oceano, Whitechapel, and Chelsea Grin, making for a memorable finale.

Genotype is an album with a strong first half (as evidenced by the songs I’m going to highlight here in a moment), but it begins to lose steam once you reach the back 4 tracks. The writing is still strong, but I felt like the momentum started to fizzle out, and I found myself more interested in the first half on subsequent revisits during the review period. Additionally, the clean vocals sound good, but they’re not a style I care much for. Sometimes I felt like I was listening to Dave Mustaine from Megadeth, just with less snarl. The unclean vocals shine more for me on this record, with their rawness and clarity punching through in a way that was satisfying to listen to. While we’re switching gears to the more positive, I also want to call out the drumming and the guitar work on this record. The drumming does a lot of heavy lifting, with many of the songs putting the drums front and center, driving the songs more than any of the other instruments.

Stellar Circuits is a Prog-Metal band from North Carolina, and another new-to-me experience that I was excited to dive into after my music contact reached out about it. Prog and by extension, Prog-Metal, is a genre I love checking out, with several of my favorite bands falling in this realm (Tool, Mudvayne, Mastodon, System of a Down, Gojira, etc). Stellar Circuits is a welcome addition to the scene in my opinion, tapping into Tool and Deftones influences with the dichotomy between loud aggression and controlled softness, as well as dynamic time signatures. The band is releasing their sophomore album, Phantom :: Phoenix November 14th, so let’s dive into the tracks that stuck out to me!

Death Metal has long been a genre that has remained on the outer edges of my taste buds when it comes to Metal, not because of a distaste for it, but rather an ignorance and lack of decent exposure to it. I’ve found over time that my interest in Death Metal has pointed me more in the direction of the genre’s multiple offshoots, like Deathcore, Melodic Death Metal, and Tech/Prog Death Metal. Despite this, I still “put my time in” and listened to some of the greats in the genre, like Slayer, Obituary, and Cannibal Corpse, but my listening habits remained rather surface-level. You may be asking yourself why the hell we're starting this review with a preamble about my Death Metal music history, but it’ll become quite clear when you give Tribal Gaze’s Inveighing Brilliance a listen. Inveighing Brilliance is a modern Death Metal record that manages to tap into the raw sound of 80s and 90s Death Metal while being contemporary enough to sound a little more polished and cleaned up for our modern ears. I felt it was important to set the stage before we dive in, as my ability to speak to the Death Metal genre may not be as in-depth or thought-provoking as it can be when I wax poetic about some of the other genres I’m much more familiar with.

A Dying Light manages to balance itself between Thrash Punk and Hardcore, with other genres occasionally slipping through (there’s a good Electronic/Industrial sound to the first track on the album, “The Feeding Grounds”, and the title track at the end of the record spends the first half sounding like a Classic Rock ballad). The vocals are raw and aggressive, the drumming is frenetic and controlled simultaneously, the bass playing is deep, rich, and present, and the guitar is crunchy and powerful. From the moment the record begins, there’s an energy present that demands your attention. Sonically, every song sounds like a wall of sound coming at you from every side, with those walls closing in on you to crush you like the trap in Saw V that Detective Peter Strahm gets stuck in (blame the Saw reference on me entering “Spooky Season”). RIP Detective Strahm.