“My skin’s so mutilated, singing the songs to make me stay.”
In the current climate of the music scene, there is little incentive to write truly genuine and original material, due to how essential streaming numbers are to a band’s success. Most groups are content to write “safe” songs that are essentially pop tracks with the occasional heavy breakdown, over and over again. This ethos, however, cannot be applied to Moodring. Starting in 2021 as the brainchild of Hunter Young, Moodring would see early success with releases such as the showmetherealyou and debut album, Stargazer. With sounds closely associated with acts such as Deftones, Young sought to write something different, however. Young clearly meant to diversify Moodring‘s sound with more prominent nu metal elements on the band’s EP, YOURLIFEFADESAWAY. Shortly before this, however, Young would be diagnosed with a rare neuro-immune disease that would alter his life forever by leaving him unable to tour indefinitely and desperately seeking a cure. Not wanting to remain stagnant and looking for an emotional outlet for all the pain in his life, Young would take the next couple of years to delve further into his love of nu metal and conceive Moodring‘s latest album, Death Fetish.
Death Fetish sees Young stripping out most of the remaining gaze elements that were front and center on previous releases, and instead focusing on writing a raw and emotional nu metal record that pulls from diverse influences. With the record-scratching heaviness that nu metal is known for, industrial noise, and even pop choruses, the emotionally devastating lyrics that comprise Death Fetish hit in a way that few musical acts are capable of piercing.
Whilst listening to Death Fetish as an album, it’s very apparent how much care Young took in honing his craft as a songwriter. Every single note played, and word sung has intention like no Moodring song before it. “Half Life” starts off the album with an engaging anthem full of bombastic switches between the soulful introspection of its chorus and the absolute rageful anger of its breakdown that not only exacerbates how mature a songwriter Young has become, but also just how much emotion he can now put into these tracks without compromising on the bar of intensity that was set on YOURLIFEFADESAWAY. While most of Death Fetish balances the more mellow side of Moodring‘s sound with the more extreme, that doesn’t mean we are left wanting in terms of either approach. ”Anywhere But Here” stands as one of the most melodic songs on the album, evoking a sense of heartbreak through what is perhaps the record’s strongest chorus, while satisfying those wanting a track that hearkens back to the sound of Stargazer, yet stronger as a whole than anything on the aforementioned album. Even the heaviest song, “Sickf-k”, shows off how intelligent the songwriting on the album truly is by displaying rawness that contains no lead guitars and instead only has bass and drums. Moodring, unlike their many constituents, manage to do much more with way less.
While, as a whole, the massively increased songwriting capabilities of Death Fetish make the album a modern nu metal classic, its soul-crushing emotion is what propels it to become a quintessential listen. As previously mentioned, before the writing and recording process of Death Fetish, Young was diagnosed with an extremely atypical neuro-immune illness that has completely rendered him unable to tour with Moodring and incapable of having a normal life. The resulting feelings of depression, anger, and hopelessness at the seemingly insurmountable odds of Young ever returning to anything even remotely resembling normality make up the gutwrenching lyrical content of Death Fetish. While many other bands may shy away from writing material that would properly convey the intense emotions that situations such as this may represent, Young is completely unafraid to express how his situation is affecting his mental state and his life as a whole. Whether it’s venting the frustrations of not being able to live a normal existence as a result of his situation on “Half Life” with “I’m living half a life now. I’m swallowing the pain, what’s left to take?” or how the intense isolation as a result of his disease is rapidly degrading the state of his psyche on “Gunplay (Suicdal 3way)” with passages such as “Does it get you off to fuck with me? So load the clip and set me free”. “coldmetalkiss” reverberates with “Another day of pills to end the constant ache, playing god to twist my fate”, sharing a strong sense of despair in terms of any of this ever improving. It’s poignant lyrics such as these that make Death Fetish an engaging listen all the way through the album’s forty-one-minute run time, and as a whole, which no doubt will make this a modern classic in heavy music.
In no uncertain terms, Death Fetish is, front to back, Moodring’s strongest material thus far. It touches on subjects that no human should ever have to experience in their lives, and at times is extremely uncomfortable to listen to because of the album’s dark lyrics. Still, every album that is ultimately worth listening to should evoke a visceral, emotional response that few bands nowadays are capable of conveying and even fewer ever manage to successfully write into their music the way that Young has managed to do so on Death Fetish. This makes it such a magnificent piece of violent art that will no doubt leave a huge mark on the scene and secure Moodring‘s stature as one of the best bands to ever grace the heavy music landscape.
9.5/10
Death Fetish releases Friday, March 27, via SharpTone Records, and you can preorder it here.