Yōkai

I don't think anyone who's seen Within Destruction live in the past couple of years was particularly surprised by the band taking this direction, even before the release of the now somewhat infamous Hate Me single and video. They were playing trap beats, pretty loudly and for long enough to draw attention to their use, directly before coming onstage in every performance I've seen by them. Now, they have opted to begin incorporating these kinds of influences, among others, into their music and, unsurprisingly, it's become a controversial album in the deathcore scene upon release. The band already had amassed a reasonable fanbase for their two preceding albums, which generally occupied the "slamcore" niche, albeit with a more prominent deathcore influence than contemporaries like Vulvodynia, as well as containing a notable if not entirely unique self-aware and goofy sense of humor. Despite the goofy internet presence and attitude, their music was ferocious and fit well with the horrifying and hulking monsters on their album covers. I am glad to say that they haven't totally abandoned this sound in this release, merely tinkered with it and added some new and rather unorthodox elements. They've already demonstrated the ability to drastically change sounds, as their first album lay much more in the melodeath-influenced area of deathcore. This was a sound they entirely abandoned - their music hasn't ever lacked melodic sensibility but they've never really made anything that sounds like From The Depths since it came out. Now, they've added modern trap-style percussion and production to most of the songs, put a few rappers on guest spots on the album, upped the general ambience by a lot - and dumbed the lyrics down to what seems like parody-level ridiculousness.

It is this last aspect that seems to have attracted the most criticism. I cannot deny, when Hate Me first came out as a single, I was somewhat alarmed myself - "watashi wa sadboi kroo"? Really? Right after this album came out, I went back and listened to their previous album Deathwish. Upon doing so, I was struck by how incredibly well-written the lyrics were - notably better than a lot of lyrics for similar bands, including the ones who hailed from countries where English was the first or second language of the country, unlike Within Destruction's native Slovenia. But instead of making me even more frustrated about the lyrics here, it made me think - Rok Rupnik or whoever is writing the lyrics for this group, clearly has a capable enough grasp of the language to do whatever it is they're trying to do. They very, very obviously (just listen to Harakiri's hook, for Pete's sake) have decided to make sillier music with sillier lyrics. Not liking this would still be a personal preference I could more than understand, but I've realized that, firstly, the lyrics are just not that important for this music, and secondly, to the extent that they are, they succeed in conveying a kind of ridiculous, very self-aware "tough guy" kind of image.

But what of the actual rest of the music? Regardless of how I might theorize about why the lyrics are the way they are, if the music sucked those lyrics would make it seem so much worse. Well, to anyone who was worried, the guitars still mainly sound like deathcore guitars. There aren't really any out-and-out slams here, but this does sound somewhat recognizable as the band that recorded Deathwish and Void - we still get blast beats, chug riffs, breakdowns, pinch harmonics, and gutturals, and they're executed well. Metal purists might not be super happy about the newer elements, but there's enough real riffage that nobody will (or should, anyway) accuse Within Destruction of having forgotten who they are or moving entirely away from the deathcore genre (to anyone baffled at that strange cover and has been wondering through this review exactly how much metal is on display here, the answer is still a lot). The songs that focus more on the metal elements, like Kings Of Darkness, Malevolent, and No Mercy, are really good. Based on these songs, I think that even if Within Destruction had decided not to innovate their sound whatsoever beyond "modern deathcore", this would still be one of my favorite extreme metal releases of the year. There are a lot of real riffs to get real excited about here. I can guess based on listening to this album that these guys have been listening to, among other things, Brand Of Sacrifice, Rings Of Saturn, Infant Annihilator, and I, Valiance - No Mercy particularly reminds me of Brand Of Sacrifice, while Backstab contains the most moments that call to mind Rings Of Saturn's trademark snazzy and spazzy hyper-technical writing style. This never feels unoriginal - everything on this album makes sense coming from this band.

Well, okay, maybe not everything, depending again on how familiar you were with the group before this album came out. This new sound I keep mentioning but haven't really gone much into - it's done really well. The intro track is all trap-inflected electronica that will give you sort of an idea of what to expect, and then the first track after that pretty effectively mixes the straightforward deathcore guitars and vocals with the electronic elements, which consists mostly of trap percussion and some synths. This is par for the course for many of the songs on the album - while their real drummer still gets plenty of time to shine, there are a lot of electronic percussion parts, employed alongside synth lines. I read someone describe the sound as "dreamy" and "like entering into another world" before I listened to it and, while it might be hard to picture a dreamy-sounding album by a band like Within Destruction, I think this kind of fits. As strange as the cover may seem at first, after a few listens, I think it truly does fit the vibe of the music. We also hear some nice prog guitar playing/shredding by Jason Richardson on the instrumental penultimate track. The fact that the band chose to put arguably the two most experimental songs right at the end, and then follow the instrumental with another instrumental closing piece, could seem like a mistake in pacing, and I'll admit that it kind of seems like the metal disappears faster than the album does, but...actually listening to it, I don't have a problem with it, so I don't think it makes sense to see it as a problem. The rapping is also integrated pretty well, although it's really not a huge presence (just showing up in two songs). None of it is "verse of the year" material, nor is it as good, perhaps more relevantly, as what you'll hear on recent releases by trap metal artists who reside more on the hip-hop side of the spectrum, like City Morgue or Lil Darkie, but it sure works, especially Kamiyada's feature on B4NGB4NG!!

Again, I'm sure metal purists won't be super jazzed about these new ingredients in the Within Destruction sound, although I'm not sure how many people like that are the kind of folks who were into Within Destruction in the first place - they were never strangers to being a little goofy, self-aware, and willing to poke fun at "serious" metalheads. Slamcore is the kind of thing a lot of elitists love to hate anyway. However, the fact is that bands change, deathcore is still evolving, and there's clearly an audience for this kind of thing right now. I for one am happy with how well Within Destruction's experimentation has paid off, and I will be eagerly watching to see where their career goes from here. Maybe next we'll get a ZillaKami collab, who knows?