“I want to move on, but Iʼve lost what made me strong.“
Time and time again, metalcore is proven to be the true sonic essence of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Everyone has something to say, even if it is self-contradictory to their own partialities. Too many cleans? Posers. Imperfect mix? Shills. Even the slightest whiff of commercial success, in which music becomes a somewhat viable means of making a living? Sellouts. All creative decisions are mistakes, and the second any form of peripheral deviation occurs, a loud, vocal minority spends whatever leftover energy they have outside of playing Counter-Strike for ten hours straight to tell you that everything you’re doing is wrong. Haven’t you heard? Atypical was the norm yesterday.
Boundaries, since the day Hartford County Misery was released almost a decade ago, have been modern insurgents of the very tropes that metalcore hardliners spent eons complaining about, from song structure to engineering. The Connecticut outfit’s particular brand of beatdown, hardcore-adjacent metalcore was, and still is, a welcome black sheep relative to the monotony that several of us had grown tired of. Indeed, it pays to branch off from general conventions, regardless of whether a gamble of that magnitude achieves immediate dividends or otherwise. Your Receding Warmth, Burying Brightness, and Death Is Little More were just the anomalous appetizers. With Yearning: The unbeautiful after, Boundaries have not only produced their flagship record but may have inadvertently opened a trend-setting metalcore Pandora’s Box. Let the covetous pandemonium begin.
Yearning: The unbeautiful after is still a fundamentally Boundaries record at its core, if only to be elevated by the incalculable amplification of each element of their established sound. Sure, black and blue beatdown has always been Boundaries‘ consistent bread and butter, but Yearning: The unbeautiful after gives that notion an entirely different meaning. Outside of a very few cases of amnesty, this album plays like a fifty-minute breakdown, top to bottom. “Malconscience“, as you’d expect, skips the warning shot and sets an immediate precedent with panic chords, pinch harmonics, frenetic atmosphere, and surgical dial-backs between buildups. For Boundaries, this is authenticity in its most palpable form, and a macabre-laced initialization for the rest of Yearning: The unbeautiful after.
Any way you want to spin it, hardcore is what the “cool” kids are aligning with as of late. Turnstile, Knocked Loose, the list goes on. By extension, it’s little wonder why Boundaries is amassing a dedicated following and continuing to push the envelope in that arena. There’s nothing overly confounded about what they pull off from a musical standpoint, only that they stick to their guns and execute it with utmost tenacity. “Skies cast amber black” is the model paramedic signaler. If the rifle blast beats aren’t homicide-inducing enough, Boundaries‘ penchant for knowing how to perfectly knock a couple of gears back and make earth-shattering sectional shifts is on full display at the latter portion of the track. Further cementing this aspect of their repertoire with “Bitter ash, bitter love” and “Unequal whole“, both of which make “Skies cast amber black” sound like a warmup, Yearning: The unbeautiful after is most punishing when the tempo eases up.
Irregular songwriting is chief among the many reasons Boundaries continue to turn heads. Yearning: The unbeautiful after stands as their strongest album yet, primarily due to the vast improvement of their aptitude for compositional integrity. Throughout their discography, the concept of refraining from audible tedium is what’s kept Boundaries at the front of the beatdown-core pack. This time around, every track takes on its own identity, if even subtly, to the furthest extent possible. Variance has been a constant from the get-go for Boundaries, but is now exhibited in the most differentiated of spades. Between “The leper’s bell“, “Only endless“, and the titular track, herein stands a trifecta of fully fleshed-out palettes of hammer strokes on an anvil with every conceivable shade of influence present and accounted for. Applicable to Yearning: The unbeautiful after as a whole, but the aforementioned slew of songs specifically, this is the truest intersection of all flavors of core we’ve heard in quite some time.
The focal point for Boundaries has always been a unique spin on modernity, but with an omnipresent backdrop of metalcore’s roots. “May this pain never leave” and “Nothing, gathered” are the time capsule tracks of Yearning: The unbeautiful after. Everything from melodeath riffs, layered vocalization, and maximally minimalist clean vocals underpin Boundaries‘ hardcore beatdown fests on this tandem. This is what the genre used to be made of, and proof of what it can still be if its practitioners so choose to acquiesce. Boundaries “Flip Phones Only” tour, when?
Thematically, Yearning: The unbeautiful after drags us further into an insurmountable abyss. Death Is Little More was a gleam of light in comparison to this album’s desperate longing for the afterlife. This is where, unironically, Boundaries have historically resonated with listeners. Everything they’ve ever written has drawn, if even partially, from personal strife. Lyrically aligning with a regrettable yet de facto facet of the human condition is as genuine as it gets in terms of emotional expression as an artist, irrespective of medium. On message’s sake alone, Yearning: The unbeautiful after is another poignantly crafted entry to Boundaries‘ solemnly emotive catalog.
Everyone and their NPC Reddit friends saw this coming. “Address me,” said the elephant in the room. For Yearning: The unbeautiful after, the elephant in the room, and steadfast point of contention ever since “Skies cast amber black” debuted as the lead single a few months ago, is the mixing. Fine, Randy LeBoeuf didn’t produce this time. Boundaries have the same engineering as Knocked Loose (by way of Drew Fulk) now, and all of a sudden it’s an issue? The sophomoric discourse diminished substantially once successive singles came out, but that doesn’t change the fact that much of this seemed pointless if everyone ultimately assimilated to the production style. It’s a good thing most artists can’t be bothered to take the opinions of chronically online plebs too seriously; otherwise, the world would be plagued by an army of Sleep Token copycats.
Boundaries gave a massive middle finger to contemporary conformity on this record, but as previously mentioned, they may have also unwittingly pulled the first plug on the avant-garde floodgates. Yearning: The unbeautiful after is the aural equivalent of an unrelentingly voracious mad dog that’s been let off the leash but still remembers to lick its wounds and rest when necessary. This sets a potentially volatile stage for what could be the gold standard blueprint for modern metalcore going forward. As double-edged as double-edged swords get, many will try to replicate what Boundaries have accomplished. While it would be embraced, the possibility of oversaturation remains. Let’s hope the patent mostly remains with the patenters.
Yearning: The unbeautiful after is foreboding, untetheringly furious, and ambient all at once. There’s no true way to amalgamate every possible sub-genre of genres together into one, but Boundaries have certainly pulled off the noblest of attempts in recent memory. Classic or modern, it hardly matters. Knowing how to merge components from each of the foundations of core gives us this exact result. Yearning: The unbeautiful after, barring anything unforeseen, will become more conducive to a present-day rebirth of metalcore than anything that’s been released in a long while. Whether you were a scene kid in the early 2000s or just beginning your head dive into this community, Yearning: The unbeautiful after is a preferentially inconsequential and altogether essential listen for anyone who calls themself a proponent of metalcore.
