“I’ve been fucking your girlfriend every weekend for the last four years.”
The adjacency matrix of this community has given another gift to us as 2025 draws to a close. Boston headhunters Coma Witch dropped arguably the strongest showing of revival sound this year a little over a month ago, and apparently decided that wasn’t enough. Where The End of Forgiveness failed to eviscerate all of mankind, PERCATORY, produced by the same group but under the moniker of A Year In Black & White, seeks to tie up loose ends with cheese grater dildo deathcore. Four songs and four different ways to be mellifluously ear raped four ways from Sunday; the intersection of Coma Witch and A Year In Black & White looks to stand triumphant over all others.
The End of Forgiveness, for all its claymore detonation blast beats and breakdowns, is nowhere near up to snuff with the sheer mass of what encompasses PERCATORY. What’s more, PERCATORY has only one speed: full fucking steam ahead, with the occasional gear shift resetting, tongue-in-cheek sampling. From a tonnage standpoint, you’d be hard-pressed to find something this consistently unrelenting outside of a Devourment record. A Year In Black & White have merely taken the most apt facets of deathcore and manufactured a product without any momentum toggling. You had like side swiping at over a hundred miles per hour, there are very few projects that show as much of a disdain for easing things up as PERCATORY.
The vocal efforts, similar to those of The End of Forgiveness, are once again to be commended. The only difference now, parallel to the instrumental counterparts of PERCATORY, is the tireless labors of meshed invocations. Complacency just isn’t in the New England quartet’s vocabulary this time around. This is essentially borrowing Brendan van Ryn, Alex Koehler, and Mitch Lucker for nine minutes and asking for their most sadistic, Monster Energy-laced highs and lows. PERCATORY is all ultimatum and no compromises.
Not to worry (unless you rightfully guessed it), those lamp post snares are here. Relative to the overall drumming performance, however, it’s just the glazed cherry grenade on top. “RACKCITY” and “DOGWORLD” display missile strike fills left and right, exacerbated only by the organ-disintegrating string work layered overtop. In tandem with the title track and “SLAMMIN’C”, every sonic legacy element of deathcore manages to find its way into PERCATORY’s short runtime, thanks to a graciously long-winded pace.
There’s an obscenely high volume of simultaneous air strikes occurring with respect to how PERCATORY is executed. By the same token, it’s hard to imagine most wouldn’t realize what they’re getting themselves into. What A Year In Black & White have created here is something we all grew up with, just amplified a thousandfold in this case. The fact PERCATORY sacrifices none of its bedlam isn’t the potential issue, but rather if most can fully stomach it and power their way through from front to back. A gambler’s bet? Most will. The joke is on you, otherwise.
2025 has been for assbeaters, and it’s not over yet. Coma Witch unleashed a mangy Cane Corso of a record seemingly yesterday, only to quite literally one-up themselves in every sense of the phrase with PERCATORY. A Rhodes scholar ode to deathcore of old, there hasn’t been a project this vehemently punishing from a poundage standpoint in quite some time. Maybe it’s better that A Year In Black & White contained this display of matricidal carnage to an EP; an album would’ve spelled the end of most people’s very existence.
9.5/10
PERCATORY has independently released as of November 21 and is available on all streaming platforms.