New Music Report – May 28, 2021
Unfortunately, I have to make things quick for this week’s new music post. Truthfully, I wanted to find time to cover Our Hollow, Our Home’s new album as well, but I just haven’t had the time and I haven’t really listened to anything other than the new Mental Cruelty album since it came out. So, I didn’t want to give an unfair shake to an album that I didn’t really get a chance to digest. That said, I didn’t really want to wait any longer to put this out because I didn’t want the Mental Cruelty album to get lost in the shuffle. If you like heavy music in any capacity, do yourself a favor and check this out.
Mental Cruelty – About a year and a half ago, I came across an album that would completely change my perception of what heavy music is capable of. Lorna Shore’s Immortal brought heavy to a new level, combining the brutality of deathcore with the relentless onslaught of black metal and holy shit, was it cool. I had never really heard anything quite like it before and since it was such a niche genre, never really heard anything like it since. Until this new Mental Cruelty album. The singles had me intrigued from the start, but I didn’t quite understand the magnitude of this album until I heard the whole thing. And now that I’ve had it on repeat for a solid week and a half, I can say with complete confidence that it blows Immortal out of the water. The complexity, the diversity of the vocals, the absolutely devastating breakdowns to the shredding guitar solos, this album is a heavy hitter from start to finish yet manages to never feel stale as so many particularly heavy albums can. This band truly is something special, and this is yet another mind-blowing staple of the blackened deathcore sound, and perhaps the best example of it yet.
Singles/Albums – Our Hollow Our Home (LP, Metalcore), Spiritbox (Metalcore), AFI (Alt-Rock), Chelsea Wolfe (Dark Folk), Bodysnatcher (Deathcore), Red Fang (Stoner Metal), Year of No Light (Post-Rock), At the Gates (Metal), Perturbator (LP, Darksynth), Of Mice & Men (EP, Metalcore), Zeal & Ardor (Avant Garde Metal), Bossk (Post-Metal), Distant (Deathcore), Turnstile (Hardcore), Reflections (Djent), The Bronx (Hardcore), Scale the Summit (Prog Metal)