POISON THE WELL

Major contributors to metalcore's early 21st century surge, POISON THE WELL were always a little too adventurous and non-conventional to truly capitalize on their lofty status. Across five albums and countless shows, the Floridians were giving the genre a much-needed injection of originality, just as the majority of its exponents were heading in the opposite direction. When they split up, not long after the release of 2009's excellent "The Tropic Rot", it seemed as much an act of necessary retreat as it did an untimely cessation of activities. After a handful of live reunions, POISON THE WELL finally committed to making a new record in 2024, and "Peace In Place" is the end result. An album that haughtily disregards the preoccupations of the contemporary scene, this marks the wholesale return of a band that never exhibited much interest in toeing the line.

Arguably among the first bands to demand more from metalcore than straight-ahead, cookie cutter conformity, POISON THE WELL have not released any new music for 17 years and return as revered elder statesmen. The good news is that they still don't sound like anyone else; their intuitive blend of metalcore, post-hardcore, and an assortment of other, less predictable influences presaged much of the cross-genre originality that has been cultivated during their absence. "Peace In Place" feels curiously out of time: a fresh statement from a band with few real peers, and a distinctly non-commercial alternative to brash, commercial hardcore that often seems to care more about social media hits than real creativity. But this is not some obtuse, art rock project. From the opening "Wax Mask" onwards, the band's sixth full-length album straddles the divide between familiarity and willful obscurity, with songs that rarely remain static, and an overall atmosphere of febrile invention that shares just enough DNA with its five predecessors to keep long-time fans happy.

At times, this is an occasionally confounding and enjoyably weird record. On the likes of "Wax Mask", "Primal Bloom" and "Everything Hurts", POISON THE WELL present a newly finessed amalgam of crunchy metalcore riffing, woozy, post-everything melody and disquieting dissonance, with singer Jeffrey Moreira's passionate bellowing and tasteful, clean vocals leading the way through a constantly shapeshifting landscape of gritty ingenuity. Some of the experimentation that defined later albums emerges once again, from the subtle surf rock shades that invade "Thoroughbreds", to the dreamy, atmospheric coda that concludes album highlight "A Wake Of Vultures". On the sumptuous, emotionally supercharged "Drifting Without End", POISON THE WELL do strange and fascinating things at the sharp end of left-field post-grunge, while on the explosive, post-punk-inflected urgency of "Bad Bodies", they briefly sound like an evil TURNSTILE. There are plenty of great riffs here, albeit tending towards the obscure, dissonant end of things, and songs like "Melted" and "Weeping Tones" have multiple moments of moshpit-friendly fury to balance out the predominant artfulness of the whole enterprise. The closing "Plague Them The Most" is particularly intriguing, as founding members Ryan Primack and Chris Hornbrook (guitars and drums respectively) twist their own blueprint into peculiar new shapes and exploit a familiar quiet / loud aesthetic to conjure music that is several times more unsettling than anything they were attempting back in the days of "You Come Before You", their 2003 commercial peak.

Always fresh and wholly fearless, "Peace In Place" will almost certainly be regarded as a grower. There are only a few moments that anyone would recognize as metalcore in any of its usual forms, and even the songs' sharpest hooks are delivered from unusual angles and in oddball contexts. But as a brave and absorbing return to action, this should delight the faithful and draw plenty of new acolytes into POISON THE WELL's idiosyncratic musical world.