BOUNDARIES – Yearning: The Unbeautiful After: Grief, Riffs & A Shot in the Face
Some albums invite you in. ‘Yearning: The Unbeautiful After’ – released via Sumerian Records (Animals As Leaders, Between The Buried And Me, Dillinger Escape Plan, Youth Code…) – kicks the door off its hinges, hits you in the face with it, then somehow expects you to say thank you.
And you probably will.
Boundaries are back with album number four: fourteen tracks of metalcore, hardcore, panic chords, blast beats, filthy riffs and enough breakdowns to qualify as structural damage.
In other words: a primal metal-hardcore shot in da face.
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NO THINK. JUST RIFF.
Hardcore/Metal is cool again. Knocked Loose kicked down some previously commercial-proof doors. Turnstile got huge. Metalcore remembered it could be nasty without forgetting how to write songs.
Boundaries sit happily in the middle of that mess. They don’t reinvent the wheel, nor even the breakdown. They simply keep finding new ways to ruin your afternoon with one.
From “Malconscience” onwards, ‘Yearning’ has the subtle elegance of a refrigerator being thrown down a staircase. Panic chords. Double kicks. Dissonance. Sudden stops. Riffs accelerating, collapsing and coming back twice as pissed off.
Fast is violent. Slow is somehow worse.
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SOPHISTICATED CAVEMAN MUSIC
Because beneath all the blunt-force trauma, Boundaries are actually getting smarter.
Melody crawls out of the wreckage. Clean vocals appear without triggering the dreaded radio-metalcore alarm. Screamo, deathcore, old-school metalcore and hardcore bleed into one another, while guests from THE PLOT IN YOU and MAKE THEM SUFFER add further bodies to the pile.
It’s caveman music. Just surprisingly sophisticated caveman music.
And underneath all that violence sits something genuinely heavy.
The record was shaped by real loss, including the deaths of several people close to the band. Grief, mortality, anger and the ugly business of continuing afterwards run through everything. Matthew McDougal doesn’t sound like someone performing aggression. He sounds like someone trying to physically get it out of his body. The breakdowns hit hard.
The reason behind them hits harder.
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METALCORE WITHOUT THE POWERPOINT
There will inevitably be discourse about the production. The mix. Whether this is hardcore, metalcore, beatdown, deathcore, metallic hardcore or post-neoclassical progressive caveman-core.
The internet has plenty of free time. We don’t.
‘Yearning: The Unbeautiful After’ is angry, grieving, ugly, melodic, occasionally beautiful and frequently disgusting. It remembers what metalcore used to feel like without sounding trapped in 2004.
Four albums in, Boundaries aren’t trying to make metalcore respectable. They’re making it dangerous again.
Turn it up. Move anything fragile away from you.
