“Only a miracle can help.”
Florida metalcore quintet Wage War have played a role as one of the frontrunners of the genre for many years now. A gateway band for many, the band gained the favour of a wide audience with their first two albums, 2015’s Blueprints and 2017’s Deadweight. Presenting relatable themes in a straightforward and often aggressive manner, they built themselves up as a powerhouse of the genre. The band’s experimentation with more accessible styles on their third album, 2019’s Pressure, proved mixed at best, with many finding it too harsh a departure from their established sound, with the exception of some standout hits. Despite this, their follow-up, 2021’s Manic, saw a redemption arc of sorts for Wage War, successfully blending their trademark aggression with their more modern direction and creating an overall cohesive sound for the group moving forward.
At the outset, the band’s fifth full-length effort, STIGMA, presents a rather concerning outlook. With guitar work that is mind-numbingly repetitive, opening song “THE SHOW’S ABOUT TO START” tries its hardest to prove to the audience that “it’s a heavy track, look! We promise! Look how heavy we are!”, but it’s held back significantly by the sheer overuse of its main riff. The verses break away to bizarre talk-singing from frontman Briton Bond, leaving the main riff to become the “hook” of the song. With the way its structured, the song hardly has any meaningful impact and it feels hollow. The song ends on a blatant wall-of-death call out, betraying the song’s sole purpose and proving a rather off-putting opener.
These issues only compound as the album progresses. Following track “SELF SACRIFICE” follows in a similar vein but opts for an overused trap beat for the verses. As its chorus thumps soullessly along, it also reveals the bland, often gauche lyricism that plagues the album, with phrases like “nowhere to run, nowhere to hide” and “sever the head, the serpent will die” leading me to struggle to take the message of the song, and much of the album, even remotely seriously. The first two songs on this album are undoubtedly ‘heavy‘, for what little that’s worth, but there’s hardly any life to their compositions.
Confusingly and frustratingly, “MAGNETIC” is haphazardly shoehorned in as the third song. A bland and uninspired pop rock song, it completely disrupts the flow instead of providing a change of pace as intended. It is quite possibly one of the group’s worst performances to date, with sappy, saccharine lyrics plaguing a dreadful chorus. A problem present on Manic persists here, wherein they just can’t seem to get the mix on the acoustic guitars right, landing as more sharp and grating on the chorus than anything else, making an already unpleasant listen even less palatable. Not missing an opportunity to throw in a ham-fisted breakdown that feels spliced from a half-baked demo they had laying around, the track feels largely inauthentic and doesn’t come close to making the impact it’s aiming for.
Rather unfortunately, most of the album swings hard and hits itself in the face, in similar, and often even worse fashion than the opening numbers. A majority of the songs push the heavy angle, with close to no clean vocals, instead opting for screamed choruses, and while that may appeal on the surface to some, they end up feeling forced and desperate. It almost feels like they’re repeatedly trying to recapture the magic of their classic track, “Stitch”, but each subsequent effort feels more lifeless than the last. “NAIL5” tries to be the quintessential heavy track, one to make the less inquisitive among their fans rejoice as they are “heavy again guys, look!”, but there is absolutely zero substance to its one-note composition. It lacks any meaningful progression too, as the song starts in one place and ends in the same spot, leaving the whole thing feeling like a waste of time. “TOMBSTONE”, although nearly identical, tries to change things up by introducing a rhythmic change from the ending breakdown, but the riff again fails to develop, and doesn’t stick around long enough to establish itself, blue-balling the listener more than anything.
Over the years, Wage War has proved itself to be good at crafting choruses. From the start, the band has demonstrated this ability more than admirably. As touched on, this strength is close to entirely forgotten on STIGMA with its push for this manufactured heaviness. Stupendously, even when they do push that angle, it turns out laughably botched. If “MAGNETIC” wasn’t enough of an indicator, “BLUR” will surely convince you with their baffling decision to drag out the words on the chorus (“feels like it’s all a blur-ur-ur-ur-ur-ur”), completely sidelining any effect the verses were building up to. Infuriatingly, the verses of the track are actually quite nice, reminiscent of their better executed past songs of a similar style and structure. This leaves “BLUR” as a song that ultimately feels as though it cripples itself at arguably its most pivotal point, confusing me to no end.
Credit where it’s due; “HELLBENT” actually lands with the concept. As inoffensive as it is, it actually commits to an idea and results in something that has a semblance of identity, with a surprisingly strong chorus and a cohesive flow that feels at least somewhat natural. It makes use of singer-guitarist Cody Quistad’s powerful vocals here in a much more effective manner than anywhere else on STIGMA – something the album sorely lacks. It come across as painfully ironic that on an album where Wage War are eager to push a heavier sound, a more accessible and hook-centric song ends up being the standout, but perhaps that’s telling of the record’s wider missteps.
Octane-core two-step riffs also scourge the album, only furthering its uninspired nature. There’s nothing to really latch onto when most of the album’s guitar work consist of overproduced chugging that reduces the guitars to a percussive element, lacking any presence or identity. Wage War’s guitar work has never been overly technical (save for some djenty riffs early on in their career), but the nuance and at least attempted innovation the band presented before is what is truly missed here. It’s this very aspect that the band seems to have overlooked altogether, misunderstanding any semblance of audience dissatisfaction and charging headfirst in a direction that won’t produce any longevity for this body of work, and surely won’t resonate much even with the most “heavy = good” minded amongst the broader metalcore audience.
Simply put, STIGMA is a mess. In a misguided effort to return to their roots, Wage War instead find themselves further from shore and more lost than ever before, crafting an album that feels underwritten, overproduced, and like the most expensive sounding waste of time in recent memory. The album is disjointed and incohesive, making sharp turns onto hostile terrain and choosing to keep driving on it. Nearly every heavy moment on the album feels crafted by a board of label executives to create social media hype, which feel destined to burn (perhaps only somewhat) bright and fizzle fast. The track lengths on the majority of the album don’t help its cause whatsoever, giving none of the tracks any meaningful time to progress into anything more than a barrage of bland chugs and one-finger riffs. With most of the album muddied into senseless noise, the intended impact of a heavier album is entirely lost with a lack of anything memorable. STIGMA doesn’t offer much beyond disappointment and a collection emblematic of a band going through a major identity crisis, and it will more than likely be lost to the void of forgettable metalcore albums in years, or perhaps even months to come.
2/10
STIGMA releases on the 21st of June via Fearless Records. Pre-order and merch links for the album can be found here.