✦✦✦✧ Korn’s fourteenth studio album showcases a streamlined and mature band that have learned how to cherry-pick from their various tics, reinvesting in the ones that still bear fruit (e.g., a seemingly endless penchant for fun guitar tones) and distancing themselves from those that no longer do (Fieldy’s scalloped tone). It’s a shame that there are no real instant classics here, which would be a far more fitting reward for their evolution.

✦✦✧✧ Whoa, when did Korn discover djent or deathcore?! It’s all fairly interesting update to the band’s sound. But the entire reason to listen to this is the fact that this is a new Korn album; otherwise, I don’t know who this is for.

✦✧✧✧ Korn’s interesting rough edges have by now been repeatedly bleached away into anonymized oblivion… except for Jonathan Davis’s trademark vocals of course. (If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear this was a solo album.) Worse, any semblance of real angst has long abandoned the band, only to have been replaced with well-honed but generic volume.