★☆☆☆ Who even wants to make industrial anymore? This is fucking awful.

★☆☆☆ Less entertaining than the band’s prior album "Forever Becoming," this collection of instrumental sludgy post-metal songs asks too much indulgence in its aimlessness. I’m sure I’d like it a lot more if I was baked out of my fucking skull, but that should be a value-add, not a requirement.

★☆☆☆ "Vintage" is right; this album feels stuck in time, comprised of a lot of ill-fitting parts. The slop-like production only makes things worse, but the bigger problem is a poor sense of pacing, seemingly in service of mood but actually the album’s biggest enemy.

★☆☆☆ What is this, Deafheaven?

★☆☆☆ This album feels like an unholy blend of every major nu-metal band’s example of their One Album After Their Last Good One.

★☆☆☆ This self-described “black metal meets negro spirituals” feels like a double case of smarmy cultural appropriation. At least it’s unusual.

★☆☆☆ Limp Bizkit meets RATM meets Butcher Babies meets Soulfly meets Body Count with just a hint of past-their-prime Ministry. In other words: a hot mess.

★☆☆☆ The good news is that this is often a spot-on homage to Death (specifically, the classic album “Spiritual Healing”). And when Gruesome is in this Tribute Mode (as they largely were on their debut album “Savage Land,” you had a sense of extrapolation into something both old and new. The bad news is that, more often than not, the music on this new album feels like the band simply took Spiritual Healing sheet music, put it in a shredder, taped the scraps back together, traveled from Orlando to Tampa (and from 2018 to 1989), found Scott Burns, and got him to record it.

★☆☆☆ This album of groove metal feels at least 15 years too late. Sure, the production is crisp, and there are some decent licks scattered about. And I do like the Kenny Wayne Shepard and Offspring covers. But even with all those wins, this album is chronically self-serious, dispassionate, and ultimately joyless.

★☆☆☆ Everything goes well until the vocals start; the wah-wah just seals the nu-metal-core deal. In the album’s defense, there are some meaty riffs undergirding the whole affair. Unfortunately, they’re deployed in the service of an outmoded and adolescent sensibility. What a waste.