“Trapped in the cycle of this manmade misery.“
It’s a challenge to know where to begin with Our Hollow, Our Home. Looking broadly, their sound draws on the 2009-2013 metalcore era, a time now abandoned by its forerunners in Bring Me The Horizon and Architects. One can further pinpoint their primary influence to Bury Tomorrow’s best work, Portraits, or perhaps the likes of The Arusha Accord and The Eyes of a Traitor, a more niche part of the genre’s history, consigned to dusty CDs. They just don’t make it like this any more.
Perhaps the most modern part of Our Hollow, Our Home is the interchanging and paragraphed statements of band members. Every member, bar Tobias Young, has left the band twice over. Outside of the speculation and whispers, it isn’t a writing environment you would expect their now final record, Hope & Hell, to flourish. Yet the one-course track that the record sticks, perhaps under a certain head, results in something as satisfying as you would expect.
Opener “Castaway”, not to be to be mistaken with the track from Of Mice & Men‘s 2023 record, Tether, opens up Hope & Hell. Those with their bingo cards at hand can tick off the lyric “Undertow” which had passed it sell by date by Northlane‘s “Intuition“. It’s the first one many moments where there is a sheer lack of lyrical cohesiveness. Bouncing between tropes of “Fight forever in a sea of my defeats“, “Leave me to drown in my own misery” and “Ignorance is bliss“, even this early in the record there’s an air of laziness, and an embrace of aimless platitudes.
For those wishing to see their head fully planted into their nearest flat object, title track “Hope & Hell” opens with “I’m the blind leading the blind, losing my mind“, and it doesn’t get any better across it’s three and a half minute run time. The inertia lyrically continues to sink in on the likes of “Veil Walker” with lines “I let the guilt be my gasoline” and “Grave Warden” shouting “Illuminate my fears“. Trying to find an obtuse lyric on Hope & Hell is like shooting fish in a barrel, and ultimately from the outset shows the narrow mindset the record sits in.
While perhaps seeming more expansive than the lyrical content, each riff and groove moves between basically everything Killswitch Engage and Bury Tomorrow did about 15 years ago, to be blunt about it. This isn’t to say they are bad – there is a limited amount of creativity, for those who can manage to hear beyond the absolute void of theme within Hope & Hell. The ‘neat‘ metalcore production that is placed across makes for an unbalanced listen, when songs such as “Veil Walker” and “Grave Warden” change between guitar tuning, sounding like a wet flannel being slapped against the ear at times.
It’s difficult not to escape the feeling that what has been forward here by Our Hollow, Our Home is lazy, which is something can be said for very few records. The lyrical content draws from tropes and metaphors that were cooked and served a decade ago, and it’s so dire that it would be surprising to see anyone get past a handful of songs on Hope & Hell. As “Bloodmoon” throws out a jukebox of phrasings of “fragments“, “memories” and “ghosts“, there is an absolute tiring sense to what’s being written here.
As challenging as it was to know where to begin with Hope & Hell, it’s just as challenging to know where to close with it. To perhaps use a word of their own, they’ve cobbled together the ‘fragments‘ of a bygone metalcore sound that they’ve drawn out of the near part of a decade. While one could argue they were drawing out the fag end of British metalcore sound on their inception, what has been present here shows a sad end to a band that for some time at least tried to revive a sound that had died out.
1.5/10