✦✦✦✧ This is unusually catchy, but it’s also very sufficiently tech-deathy. There’s an obvious lean toward songcraft here; that, coupled with the ultra crisp production and emotive cleans, combine to file down the rough edges a bit, giving you an album that often sounds more like Parkway Drive than The Acacia Strain.

✦✦✦✧ This album finds Whitechapel farthest afield from the deathcore of their formative years, to excellent effect. Sure, the band is still tuned down and know their way around a breakdown, but that’s all leavened by a complexity and progressiveness that I wasn’t entirely sure they had in them. Destined to make it onto lots of best-of lists in December.

★★☆☆ On the one hand, this is a step up for the band from their eponymous 2012 release. The songwriting is an evolution from their deathcore-by-the-numbers approach, at times evoking a Lamb Of God or even a latter-era Carcass. On the other hand, the band do still suffer a lot from large swaths of unmemorable flexing.