✦✦✧✧ At last, a pretty solid album from Prong! Tommy Victor is an excellent form as ever. The songs are more reminiscent of Beg To Differ than anything else they’ve put out in the last decade, and that’s for the good. So what if some of the songs sound like Black Label Society, or Biohazard, or Body Count?

✦✦✧✧ This is a wildly off-balanced album. Track after track, you’re not sure if you’re listening to a Prong deep cut, a latter-era King’s X single, a particularly aggressive Linkin Park track, the title track of the next Tremonti album, etc. But despite the odds, this makes for an oddly compelling listen.

✦✦✧✧ Y’all know that I’ve loved Prong from back in the day (Headbanger’s Ball, holla). But this album gets off to a boring start, and has a hard time shaking off that misstep (even though the riffs get better as the album unspools). Then we get to the twin surprises of the album: the bizarre metalcorish “Do Nothing” and the purposefully detuned “Belief System”.

★★☆☆ I’ve had this theory in my head for a while now: Prong has been dead and gone for almost 20 years, and everything we hear now from the band is akin to a new Michael Jackson release: resurrected from lost tapes and B-sides to the Cleansing and Rude Awakening recordings, perhaps propped up with guest musicians, but not truly new.