Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Dehumanized” from Bring Me the Horizon.
I am a big fan of giving credit where credit is due. I never really connected with Bring Me the Horizon, either in their earlier deathcore days or their later more expansive and poppy material. I was too deep into the underground and weird wings of heavy metal to have a strong attachment to deathcore as it was breaking out and by the time they had shifted their sound, I was already on to other musical terrain myself. But their tendency toward challenging themselves and their audience, be it with 20 minute tracks or pop material, always impressed me and showed a band that was genuinely interested in artistic growth, which is always charming.
So color me surprised when, on hearing “Dehumanized,” the sole new composition on their re-recorded Count Your Blessings album, I encountered a song that was genuinely charismatic even to a listener like me. Their breakdown riffs here sound closer to contemporary hardcore than to metalcore of the mid- to late-2000s variety, including elements pinched from things as far afield as noise rock, industrial, and nu-metal. There are riffs here that, with adjusted production, wouldn’t be out of place on a proper death metal record alongside guitar melodies that feel as in love with the sound of a guitar as great rock music should be.
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It takes something special for a crusty old extreme metal weirdo like me to concede a point. I have to hand it to Bring Me the Horizon. “Dehumanized” even got me to listen to the other singles from the re-recording and discovered a lot of great ideas I had overlooked when the album first came out 20 years ago. Bravo, gang. I tip my hat to you. Turns out I was wrong!
Honorable Mentions
Dead Poet Society – “Roach”
Despite the appearances of rock, industrial, and metal, this song is fundamentally a hip-hop track. Feel the bounce of the track, that infectious sense of continuous rhythm, as well as the calm, confident flow of the vocal pattern. The fusion of hip-hop with these more abrasive styles has typically been more successful the other way around, with hip-hop producers and rappers having a keener grasp of heavy music stylistic quirks to fold into their music than rock, punk, and metal performers satisfyingly including rapping or its rhythmic devices. The glorious success of “Roach” comes from the seriousness and equal sense of value Dead Poet Society treat both ends of the song, with the hip-hop elements feeling like they would be compelling even stripped of the sonic quirks and the noisy, clattering production feeling propulsive even sans vocals.
Elysian Blaze – “Ascenturion”
To counter-balance things, here is a 17-minute progressive/extreme metal track. “Ascenturion” captures a jaw-dropping scope, possessing a sense of grandeur and decay that provoke a sense of watching ancient ruins caught somewhere between the beauty of antiquity and the despair of fallen empires. If that’s melodramatic and overblown, that’s because the track is, too; it presents an emotionalist-imagist tableau, like great expansive progressive music should, gesturing with a sweep of the arm to a catching vista. It also provides a compelling image of the breadth of heavy music, that something like this can coexist in the same sonic world as Bring Me the Horizon, showcasing the fullness of this sonic world.
Green Lung – “Necropolitan Line”
What a commanding Deep Purple pastiche. Green Lung here deliver a song that gives those glorious guitar/organ lines and spontaneous shifts to major keys and little neoclassical touches that made Deep Purple the legends they are today while also sprucing things up with a couple little flourishes that feel sometimes more Yngwie Malmsteen or Randy Rhoads. The vocals too take on a bit more aggressive bite, landing them close to fellow contemporary doom rockers Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats. It’s hard to imagine anyone who seriously likes the more evil wing of rock not digging this one.
Russian Circles – “Empath”
Post-metal in its heyday eventually became typecast as long, uneventful music, interested in a crescendo and cinematic grandeur that often didn’t pay off its premise. Russian Circles has endured beyond those bounds because they evolved, or in this case devolved, with the times. These are players from groups like Botch, SUMAC, Riddle of Steel, and more. Having that well of other styles, be it hardcore or improvisational music or a shared love of black and death metal, gives the band the tools to perform what they do here on “Empath,” a song that takes all the tunneling ferocity of extreme metal and drives it into your chest without the easy reprieve of a chorus. This doesn’t feel like tension that goes nowhere but a concentrated freak out, replete with a breakdown riff that would make hardcore kids knock each other out in the pit with glee. It’s brilliant.