SUICIDE SILENCE

There was a brief moment when SUICIDE SILENCE appeared to have pissed on their own fireworks. This story has a happy ending, of course: as hinted at loudly on 2020's "Become The Hunter", and confirmed beyond doubt and with white-hot venom here. But back in 2017, that now notorious self-titled album, produced by Ross Robinson, looked like a potential career-ender. With hindsight, "Suicide Silence" is not quite the calamitous misstep of legend, and given the eye-popping ferocity of "Remember… You Must Die!" , it now seems like it was a necessary step. Resourceful bands with a dash of self-awareness have good reason to veer off the expected path, as a means to shake things up, to reset, to reassess and to reject old ideas in favor of the new and exciting. If the outcome in this case didn't quite match the bright-eyed ambition of the brief, it certainly made SUICIDE SILENCE all the more determined to look and act like the (sub)genre-defining champions they always were. If "Become The Hunter" was a renewed statement of intent, "Remember… You Must Die!" is the payoff.

Not content to make a straightforward return to the scything, spiteful deathcore of their first few records, SUICIDE SILENCE have decided to come back nastier, heavier and with a glaring absence of anything resembling a fuck given. If it's deathcore you want, they may well be thinking, then you can fucking have it. Right between the eyes.

After one of the most convincing and genuinely creepy horror-style intros in recent memory, "You Must Die" explains the rejuvenated SUICIDE SILENCE philosophy in less than three minutes. Violent, snot-encrusted deathcore is the name of the game. Rather than merely churn out 40 minutes of old-school beatdown-and-bree, which they undoubtedly could have done, they have taken the essence of their original sound and twisted it into even uglier shapes. There was a time when SUICIDE SILENCE could be reductively described as a blend of KORN and SUFFOCATION, but not here: this is pure vitriol, with Eddie Hermida's unearthly gutturals and dog-bothering squeals sounding more deranged than ever, and the band's curb-stomp riffs delivered with an extra layer of string-scraping scabbiness. It is both wickedly dumb and extremely smart: a timely redux for a timeless sound but informed by a decade or more of genuine turmoil.

The rest of "Remember… You Must Die!" maintains the title track's absurdly brutal and untamed demeanor. "Capable Of Violence (N.F.W.)" and "Fucked For Life" are both finely honed riot starters, with some of the most warped and evil riffs that SUICIDE SILENCE have ever penned. "Kill Forever" is exactly the kind of psychotic singalong that elevated the band so early on in their career, but with more blastbeats, more lurching breakdowns and, most importantly, a lot more rage. "Alter of Self" delivers a downtempo, metronomic beating with strong echoes of late '90s death metal; "Endless Dark" is two minutes of pure berserker deathgrind interspersed with rib-rattling grooves fit to give LAMB OF GOD nightmares. Most startling of all, the closing "Full Void" is a suffocating storm of black pomp that weaves classic metal melodic sensibilities into a swirling, obsidian miasma of MORBID ANGEL madness.

We get the best of both worlds here. Firstly, SUICIDE SILENCE have reconnected with the dark energy that made them undisputed scene leaders in the first place. Secondly, the will to bend deathcore to their own perverse ends is as strong as ever. "Remember… You Must Die!" is a joyous, obnoxious thing. Welcome the fuck back.