“Distort the truth to silence the victim.”
It’s hardly any secret that a nostalgic aura encompassed in familiarity has been resonating throughout the air for the past couple of years. Circulating within is the overwhelmingly well-received resurgence of foundational metal, death, and hardcore. Being the true cradle from which the scene was wrought, there’s arguably no other interval between now and then that manages to retain a vicegrip on the sonic preferences of many.
While anticipatorily the least of most people’s worries, strict resolution to one genre or the other has been—perhaps expectedly—noticeable. In fairness, there is no need to meld different irons together when the base material is sufficient to produce a deep-cutting piece. Sharp yet tapered, heavy but wieldable; these are the constant traits for which practically every revival project we’ve heard thus far has turned out. Even with an extensive class of reliable smiths, there will surely be a few grandmaster forgers amongst the pack. Those that coalesce divergent elements and still produce a result that outshines all others. One such virtuoso is South Carolina outfit, Your Spirit Dies.
Since 2019, Your Spirit Dies have welded the components of metal and hardcore together in a domineering fashion. Prodigy craftsmen are held to an ever-heightening standard because of their ability to create something better than before. They set the benchmark for which others should model their handiwork after. True to established champion descriptors, Your Spirit Dies have derived everything that made their first two EPs glisten above all else and cast a crowned jewel with their debut album, My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest.
With Your Spirit Dies being the consistent artisans they are, one can’t help but wonder what shapes the mold of their painstaking approach to workmanship and the tools they utilize. The first aspect to examine is influence. My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest, much in lockstep with their previous work, has the punishing tones of classic metalcore with an unrelenting hardcore overlay that could make groups like The Acacia Strain blush. And this time, the wizards of genre synthesizing have a new technique on deck: swings of At The Gates-esque melodeath. This triangle of interwoven sound is especially omnipresent on “Trenches of Pain“, “Serpentine“, and “A Rose for Every Stone“. Front to back, Your Spirit Dies manage to compound this unlikely trinity of audible inspirations into a thirty-eight-minute ass-beater of a record. Do not expect even the slightest of reprieves, either. You will feel the brunt of every hammer stroke it took to build My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest.
Suffice it to say that whenever multiple genres are fused in the way Your Spirit Dies have done, production goes a very long way in terms of how sustainably engaged listeners will be. Try to make the music sound too good, and many will quickly lose interest. If the inverse is applied and the sound is too ostentatiously raw, most who have any semblance of hearing ability will outright forego diving in further. This is where we find a balance that My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest vigorously presents. The equilibrium of production style gives it the force of an industrial granulator. Every layer of mixing deserves the utmost praise. However, the one area of pure sound engineering that gleams more brightly than anything else is the drumming. The pedal kicks on My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest are the musical representation of every strike inflicted on the anvil that made this album. Palpable beyond comprehension, standout tracks like “Monochrome” and “Shrouded in Silence” showcase drummer Brannon Crumpton giving us his cornerstone Kevin Boutot dedication. Many will return to My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest to appreciate the impeccable production work.
Your Spirit Dies could be the lone wolves of inter-genre string mastery. On virtually every track, we go from quintessential metalcore chugs to melodeath riffs in the blink of an eye. One minute, you hear shades of Killswitch Engage’s As Daylight Dies. The other, Michael Amott’s ghost appears and gives us a club-to-the-head Arch Enemy riff. “In the Depths of Grief” and “Born Forsaken” are primary examples of guitarists Holden Hall and Tyler Dorman, along with bassist Keagan McChesney, providing a tasteful vacillation of switchups. It seems practically impossible to gel three distinct genres together without obfuscating the structural dynamic of how an album, let alone a song, should sound. Yet this is another esoteric enigma Your Spirit Dies not only managed to solve, but permanently cracked on My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest.
Brandon Byars is equally demonstrative of the untethered prowess of My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest. For a record where chaotically maintaining control is vital, Byars resounds the unendingly pissed off demeanor hardcore proponents have become privy to over the years whilst saving room for metalcore rudiments. “Ritual Sacrament“, “A Snow in Summer“, and “An Effigy of Failure” are keen indices of two-step-inducing reverberations, whereas “Unjust God” and “Night Pierces My Bones” provide moments of clean vocalization. In each case, Byars’ style complements the musical backdrop to a tee.
You have your entire life to make your first album. There’s an expectation that plays into the process by which it’s put together. Like any first impression, the sheer weight of how others perceive you rides heavily on how your debut record turns out. Arguably, this is when pressure is at an all-time high. Sometimes, as is the nature of humanity, the moment becomes too big, and artists can flounder outright and never recover. In the case of Your Spirit Dies, that could not be further from reality. For the grand smiths of triangulated genre merging, they are too big for the moment. It is exceedingly rare to the point of perhaps being unheard of that a band can both knock a debut out of the very stratosphere and lay the blueprint for how to properly co-mingle multiple domains of metal into a full-length composition. My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest is a diamond-in-the-rough anomalous gem that towers above a long line of first steps into the underground music scene.
9/10
My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest releases on May 2nd through MNRK Heavy, and you can preorder it here.