✦✦✧✧ 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.