“The voice in my head becomes way too much.”
When it comes to experimentation within heavy music, and more specifically deathcore, bands have a thin line to walk. While changing things up occasionally is necessary to keep listeners engaged and grow your audience, there is always the risk of changing your sound too much and alienating listeners. While many bands learn these lessons and fail to course-correct, it is refreshing to see a band such as Ingested take the path less traveled and grow from those experiences. Since starting in the early 2000s, Ingested saw early success with their slamming debut album Surpassing the Boundaries of Human Suffering before eventually transitioning into the more brutal, deathcore-adjacent sound that they became known for on albums such as The Level Above Human and Where Only Gods May Tread. Not wanting to put out the same album repeatedly, Ingested later tried to change things up with a more atmospheric sound on Ashes Lie Still and even clean-sung choruses on their most recent album, The Tide of Death and Fractured Dreams. Unfortunately, these attempts resulted in two albums that, while different, failed to keep listeners engaged throughout and made for rather uneven listens. Taking the lessons from these albums to heart, the band returns today with their new album Denigration to reclaim lost ground.
As an album, Denigration sees Ingested stripping out much of the experimentation of their previous two albums and focusing on a return to the straightforward, brutal nature of earlier albums, while also adding the occasional subtle twist to keep the album’s familiar yet satisfyingly heavy sound fresh.
As mentioned previously, the defining feature of Denigration is its return to the bludgeoning deathcore that made albums such as Where Only Gods May Tread so appealing. There are no clean-sung choruses to detract from the otherwise brutal nature of the songs, nor are there overly long atmospheric noise sections that make the songs feel monotonous or drawn out. Instead, each song on Denigration provides the no-frills, brutal deathcore sound that fans of the band crave. After a brief but eerie fade-in, “Dragged Apart” begins the album with a crushing, riff-heavy breakdown that does a great job of setting the expectation that Ingested mean business when it comes to the brutality of this record. Even what listeners could consider the chorus takes a satisfyingly punishing approach, with the vocals yelled rather than sung over the brutal riffs in a way that only a band as skilled as Ingested could pull off. Wasting no time, we are then thrown into the second song of the record, “Merciless Reflection,” which sees the band picking up the pace with one of the speedier songs on the album. It gives hints of the early slam influences that gave the band’s early material such massive appeal, and these hints of their old slam sound lead to a satisfying payoff in the second half of the song, when the feature from Damonteal Harris of PeelingFlesh kicks in to make the slam elements of the song’s crushing breakdown hit even harder, driving home that Denigration is the true return to heaviness that fans have been craving.
While the main focus of Denigration as a whole is to provide listeners with one of the most brutal listens they have had from the band in years, that does not mean Ingested have not thrown a couple of curveballs into the songwriting. A good example of the album’s occasional curveball lies within the song “Stitch By Stitch,” which sees the band take on a more metalcore-esque structure. Instead of making the yelled chorus the focal point, as one might expect from a song with this kind of structure, the big selling point is how the melodic pseudo-chorus weaves so perfectly into the song’s crushing slam portions. This makes the trade-off between its more melodic aspects and its heavier ones feel more natural than one might expect from a band such as Ingested. Further experimentation with the album’s sound can be heard on the penultimate track, “Steel Toe Truth,” which sees the band infusing the song’s riffs with a rather engaging and anthemic groove. This not only provides a satisfying twist to the sound of Denigration, but also allows for a satisfying segue into the melancholic nature of the closing track “Cold Sun,” rounding off the album in a more satisfying way than some previous Ingested listening experiences.
Overall, Denigration is a resounding return to form for Ingested. While the album does not take a whole lot of risks, what makes Denigration such an engaging listen is the fact that, even though the band’s previous experimentation may not have worked as well as they had hoped, this shows that they are capable of taking those lessons to heart and refining their tried-and-true formula in subtle ways. These changes provide a fresh listening experience while also showing that, if the band continues to refine their craft in subtle but meaningful ways, Ingested will remain one of the best deathcore bands of the modern era.
8/10
Denigration is out this Friday, May 8, via Metal Blade Records, and can be pre-ordered here.