Wake

No seriously, it actually is For Today's final album considering they recently stated on social media about splitting up after 11 years together.

On a personal level, once I heard them from a friend's recommendation, I became a fan in 2014 and was obsessed with them ever since. After 2-3 years of being a fan, buying merch, going to their concerts, and listening to all of their albums through and through this album left me pretty impressed. It's no surprise that they came off super heavy in their early years of Portraits and Ekklesia, but this Wake really made a change of tide for their sound and band as a whole. Considering how most of the band's music was played in either a B or an E key, this album changed by having it in a sharper F and C which made it more dynamic and had it stand out more among the others. The album starts off strong with "No Truth, No Sacrifice", and continues to stay strong until "Hopeless Ambition", from then on the album begins to kind of fade away and the rest of the album becomes more like background, but stays heavy lyrically with the only key change in the whole album being in "Time and Tide".

Musically, I was happy to find out that the large metalcore breakdowns were saved mostly for the ends of the songs or their were none at all. Songs like Bitter Roots and Broken Lens are a good example of this. Speaking of breakdowns, it's something that For Today has always made unique about themselves because unlike a huge lot of the bullshit metalcore bands that exist today that love to have breakdowns every 45 seconds, For Today always has a perfect spot to place it in. Their songwriting skills are near musically genius in that regard. It's because of that aspect of For Today that makes it's atmosphere resonate around one another. Sadly though one major turn off from the album is the constantly repeated use of the fuzz pedal with random high octave notes here and there, while it does add more ambiance it becomes distracting and pestering sometimes.

Mattie Montgomery's vocals has always been a huge part of the band in of itself, in this album he takes it to both ends of the spectrum in highs and lows. However sometimes one may have to read the lyrics on a website or something because his highs can be hard to decipher, it took me forever to understand the highs in Broken Lens until I saw the video. The Christian lyrics in Wake are very strong as well, as it stays subtle yet forces a huge impact on the listener even after 11 years.

Overall however, since Wake is the concluding album of For Today's career, I've got to say they ended strong with this one, unlike Fight The Silence since that album was more like an album to mosh hard to. I definitely recommend it as it's quite underrated and is an improvement from last time. Sometimes I wish I could have been a fan of the band since the beginning, but I was happy I got to see them twice live and will for one last time on their farewell tour.