✦✦✦✧ This is Trivium’s best album in a decade. On top of everyone’s already ridiculous shredability, Matt Heafy’s vocals are vastly improved, if a little more metalcore than is strictly advisable — his low-rent Hetfieldisms only show up toward the end of the album, thank goodness. And the band’s trademark small-plates approach to metal remixing is more cohesive and sensible here than ever before.

✦✦✧✧ This is a bit of a step down from predecessor “The Sin And The Sentence,” but there’s still plenty of the band’s metal-for-the-love-of-metal all over the album. There’s also a conspicuous accessibility in a lot of the material here that might excite the SiriusXM metal crowd, but doesn’t really do much for me.

✦✦✦✧ This is the best and most interesting Trivium album since 2011’s “In Waves.” It’s shreddily heavy even when it’s not trying to be (dude, blast beats!), even as the band suppress their muscularity long enough to tick the other checkboxes. As always, Trivium are more transparent than most with their influences and “this-sounds-just-like”s, but the unpredictability of their mood swings helps offset that.

★☆☆☆ This album has a tendency to sound like a hybrid between Static X, Hatebreed, BABYMETAL, Arch Enemy, and Oingo Boingo. At least it’s an interesting carwreck.

★☆☆☆ A couple of shining moments in the back half of this album (including sublime leads by Corey Beaulieu, and a fun-enough palate cleanser of a Misfits double cover) can’t save an otherwise dreary and forgettable 47 minutes. You can really smell David Draiman all over “Vengeance Falls”… and it doesn’t smell good.