✦✦✧✧ This is my frontrunner for the most ChatGPT djent album of the year.

✦✦✦✧ VOM have by now perfected their recipe for metalcore-anchored djent. Think TesseracT-meets-Vildhjarta-meets-All That Remains. It’s an intriguing yet unholy alliance, and the combinations miss the mark a nontrivial amount of the time. But there’s enough here, between the songwriting, musicianship, and surprising twists that it defies dismissal. Definitely worth a listen, perhaps as a consummate example of what’s possible in metal in 2017.

★★★☆ A meaty, albeit nu-metalish and slickly overproduced, post-djent bouillabaisse (with definite nods to Periphery, Chimp Spanner, et al). But what it lacks in originality per se, this album more than makes up for with a doubled-down commitment to all the tropes that make this microgenre so great: feminine subject matter, pseudorandom switching between clean singing and incoherent screaming, and above all, spasmodic aggression.