Hi everyone, Breakthony Downtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of the new No Cure album, It Is Going to Get Dark.

This is the debut album of No Cure, a Birmingham, Alabama loud rock act who, throughout the earlier side of the 2020s, were deep into the metalcore trenches, slowly coming up through a series of very solid EPs which helped them hone the sound that they are currently delivering on this record. And it's a vibe, it's an aesthetic, it's a style that is very deeply in tribute – in homage, you could say – to a certain era and a certain subset of the hardcore scene.

To make it painfully obvious, one of their earliest singles was actually a tribute to the Earth Crisis song, "Firestorm." So yeah, these guys are pretty loud, very breakdown-centric, very edge, and very opinionated. But these guys aren't exactly your average, generic, meat-and-potatoes metalcore band, no. There are, of course, death metal elements worked into their sound as well. And, yeah, I know there are a lot of people that kinda like roll their eyes at just the mere concept of deathcore, and I understand why – there are a fair amount of pretty mediocre deathcore bands out there, that really exist purely for extreme technical flashiness and nearly meaningless gestures toward some kind of vague sense of brutality. That is not what No Cure is doing, though.

I would actually argue many of their nods to death metal are not only tasteful but substantive. Yes, you get lots of heavy, brutal, chunky, chromatic riffs throughout this thing, but also the death metal influences lead to a kind of melodic flair on a lot of these tracks as well, that allows the band to suddenly break into the sinister, theatrical, sometimes harmonized guitar melody sections. Death metal vibes also come through on the really guttural, deep death growls that are laid throughout this album that, of course, play against the more hardcore and metalcore-inspired vocal passages.

You've got some touches of blast beats here and there as well, some technical drumming, double bass. And I would actually say the death metal inspiration kind of comes through on the lyrical side as well, in an interesting way. Because, yes, like a lot of great and influential hardcore and metalcore bands from 20 or 30 years ago, No Cure loves to deal in themes of not just betrayal, but also self-affirmations around, of course, drug use and straight edge and so on and so forth, because some of the best hardcore and metalcore is borderline almost religious in its writing and lyrical tone, giving a breakdown-backed sermon in a way.

But again, the death metal inspiration allows No Cure to actually write about these same themes with kind of a morbid twist. Again, with the themes of drug use and addiction, which go into kind of gory and harrowing detail when it comes to overdoses and withdrawals, and just the feelings and signs of addiction themselves.

Again, the effect is more bone-chilling and eerie than what you might get from your average metalcore proselytizing. I would say it also sort of impacts tracks like "Brain Matter Displacement," whose macho violence actually gets kind of gory. This track also features a rapped verse from Bayway NJ, which I'm not crazy about, but I do have to say there is a much younger version of myself who would have been crazy about this. I guess it shows how out of touch with the hard- and metalcore scene I am these days that I didn't even know this type of guy still existed. Still, again, as dated as moments like this feel, I do feel like there is intention here in terms of No Cure trying to tribute eras of hard- and metalcore that inspire them to do what they're doing now.

But also, It Is Going to Get Dark is not just simply an exercise in nostalgia. There are moments where I feel like the band very effectively updates the metalcore and straight-edge ethos in a way. With tracks on here such as "Purity Spiral," where they are going into themes around ideological extremism, or even "Starved in Sanctuary," where a lot of the lyrics kind of boil down to the systematic critiques around the economy and poverty and the work week, to put the average person in this perpetual state of suffering and struggle. Because, yes, it's not just simply drugs and alcohol and the like that are tearing apart the lives of the average person or the hardcore scene.

Still, the band does sort of circle back to those baseline, kind of ideological, I would say, touchstones on the track, "I Am Still Fucking Straight Edge," which is a bombastic, loud, audacious, over-the-top proclamation of edgehood. Which, again, is so ideological, so driven, so assured of its viewpoint, and a lot of the best hard-and metalcore is. The record also has a really strong closer ["Everything I Love is Dead or Dying"] with a lot of gang vocals.

Another thing I want to praise this album on for sure is the production, which, at first glance, is very loud, very bricked, very dense, very heavy. At first I thought it was going to come across as very run-of-the-mill sonically, but the more that I listened to it, the more there were some nuances I was really appreciating. There are some noticeable variations in intensity and volume. This is not a record that sounds at the exact same level of, I guess, heft and blaring, deafening sound the entire way through.

This thing is loud from the jump, don't get me wrong, but during some of the most massive breakdowns and huge towers of death growls and bass riffs, and so on and so forth, but the band does manage to eke out a few extra decibels to make sure that these tracks don't sort of go stale or sort of lose their punch before they're actually over.

The record overall is a very trim 33 minutes, too, so there's no possible way of this sort of thing overstaying its welcome. A lot of the riffs, breakdowns, and choruses – even standout verse lines throughout this thing, I would say – are relatively catchy for the genre too. And every single individual element in these instrumentals has its own nice little pocket in the mix where it can shine. The vocals are super crisp, super intense, you hear every single inflection. The bass is nice and nasty. The guitars have a super heavy, crunchy tone. The drums have an immense amount of punch, and that snare is such a reflection of modern metalcore trends in that the sustain on it is crazy. It sounds like the band is just smashing a keg not a snare drum, because it's got that really long metallic dongggg that sort of rings out.

There are some elements of this album, I will say, that are a little one-dimensional, and some of these, old metalcore tropes, even if they are being done with a lot of heart and have some respectable updates on this album, do run a little bit cheesy for me. Still, though, I can't deny that this album is really doing something for me that a metalcore album hasn't in a long time, which is why I'm feeling a decent to strong 8 on it.

Anthony Fantano. Still fucking straight edge. Forever.