If, per chance, Boundaries’ past outings felt a little too bright and cheery for your tastes, do we have a treat for you! Here’s an album based around Dante Alighieri’s notion that death is barely a worse quantity than a miserable existence in life, extrapolated into a metallic hardcore bludgeoner with barely a thought of restraint crossing its mind. Sounds good, right?
So, yeah, this is probably Boundaries’ best album, by a clear amount. They’ve actually done rather well at pulling themselves from the bog of metallic hardcore monotony, not just through generally solid work but also clear efforts to grow musically. ‘Diverse’ is a stretch—even saying there’s a sound or approach exclusive to Boundaries might go too far—but there’s evidently something there. Something which appears to have come to fruition on Death Is Little More, too, and not from any tremendous reinventions either. Boundaries are continuing on their preordained path, but, as seems to be tradition with comparatively simple branches of metal and hardcore experiencing a serious leap upwards, they’re doing a lot with it.
Most important thing first—in terms of metallic hardcore’s abject savagery, this is right up there. The feel is that of a band with little interest in respite, or any activity that doesn’t involve ripping some unfortunate soul to shreds, such is the calamitous heft pumped in by the gallon. The most consistent source of this decimation is the vocals, as Matt McDougal occupies a tried, tested and true realm of guttural man-bull capable of levelling a small country with the wham lines he drops. Seriously, you’ve never heard a harder delivery of “I fucking hate you” than on Turning Hate Into Rage, and that’s just the first track! There’s a bounty of bomb-drops to be vaporised in the blast radius of, where Boundaries’ indifference to flexibility or innovation makes the kilotons feel all the more searing. And yet, when you pit McDougal up against Kublai Khan TX’s Matt Honeycutt on Blood Soaked Salvation, he’s really put through his paces compared to the southern snarl that makes a simple line read of “Oh my god damn!” one of year’s prime hardcore moments so far. Yeah, we’re only a few months in, but trust—that’s not gonna change.
It really is the cleanest illustration of what ramping up the firepower alone can achieve. Doubly so when stacked against some of the briefer flashes where Boundaries do try and open things up; the efforts are valiant, but they aren’t a match. Blame’s Burden proves the most jarring with its jittery electronics and the album’s sole instance of a breather in its rippling interlude. It’s the furthest past an acceptable threshold that Boundaries go, though that appears to more an errant misstep considering they tend to be pretty good at holding firm. Scars On A Soul is borderline modern metalcore in an approach that’s quicker, more lithe and—gasp!—melodic, while steering far away from flimsiness or overworking. Elsewhere, the onus on crushing noise is redirected to squealing, erratic fractals on Turning Rage Into Hate and the title track, and a passage of crunching drum texture on A Pale Light Lingers.
For the meat and potatoes of Death Is Little More, however, it’s a fairly front-loaded affair. It’s where the strikes come thickest and fastest, highlighted in Like Petals From A Stem as a minute-and-a-half power play that genuinely feels like the upper limit of Boundaries’ heaviness. As a cavernous hardcore display anchored in a decimating percussive display, it’s the heaviest song by far on an album that’s already largely hewn from lead. That being said, the destruction isn’t quite as dense as it proceeds. Post-title-track, the production starts to feel a miniscule amount more open, enough to notice without spoiling the experience as a whole. After all, there’s a spark of redemption that crackles to life as it goes on, wriggling free from the fog of loathing and vindictiveness to manifest healing. Calling it an arc might oversell a throughline that’s lightly sketched at best, but it can sit comfortably beside Boundaries efforts, heavier-than-heavy or just regular-heavy.
If Boundaries are to be launched into the upper echelons of metallic hardcore welt-leavers, this is the way to do it. There’s enough of a balance between pure doubling down and not exhausting themselves through it, nailed like a second nature in a way that they’ve never seemed so adept at. Again, even if it’s hard to totally qualify, this is a significant leap up, just in terms of feel alone. And considering how, up to now, Boundaries have been perennial second-stringers in this scene—at best—that’s a pretty damn solid accomplishment right there.
For fans of: Kublai Khan TX, Gideon, Alpha Wolf
‘Death Is Little More’ by Boundaries is released on 29th March on 3DOT Recordings.
Words by Luke Nuttall
