Even before their debut album, thrown are already a bit of a phenomenon. Their entire catalogue consists of a five-song EP and the loose singles building up to this, and that’s somehow amassed them well over a million monthly streams on Spotify alone. On top of that, there’s never been the waft of a Spiritbox or Sleep Token situation around them, where the narrative of ‘upending metal’ has been an unavoidable cog in their ascent. You could almost believe that thrown have the marketing team of Jesus Christ himself backing them, because there’s no earthly way that they should be racking up numbers like this.
The truth is, as ever, a lot more mundane. thrown have simply been obscenely gracious beneficiaries of the Spotify algorithm, getting stuck in as an auto-play or suggested artist at the end of basically every hardcore and metalcore playlist. (Allegedly their prolificness is a result of taking a cut in revenue for better placement, though it’s hard to find that substantiated anywhere besides the oh-so-reliable source of metalcore Reddit.) So not fudging the numbers, per se, but it’s still an inflation of the response you’d expect from a band as profoundly, uniformly ‘just okay’ as this. And that’s the thing—outside of the usual crowd who’ll hoot and holler and soyface over anything new with a ‘-core’ suffix, what would thrown’s reach be under normal, non-business-savvy circumstances?
In fact, wanna know some bands that are empirically doing ‘less well’ than thrown? Counterparts. Stray From The Path. The Ghost Inside. All are acts that sound similar and that a right-thinking mind would presume to be bigger, and they’re also a lot more distinctive. They carry themselves as scene figureheads based on more than just numbers. thrown, meanwhile…don’t. They have more weight than the cavalcade of Glup Shittos that metalcore spawns on any given day, but that’s about as far as it goes.
It’s already become a point of note that thrown’s material all largely sounds the same, and EXCESSIVE GUILT isn’t disputing that. There’s a straighter hip-hop front put up on bitter friend and look at me, but even they’re quick to devolve into more of the same. That ‘same’ is a brand of metallic hardcore that isn’t exactly dripping with innovation. You know it already—the stock-sturdy, low-grumbling grooves you’d find on page one, line one of the Metalcore Handbook. It’s honestly really forgettable, and reliant squarely on thrown’s own proficiency to stop itself sinking lower. Playing well and doing the right thing is all they have; there’s no blossoming personality to take the wheel at any point.
Perhaps the closest thing to ‘something of their own’ is how short these songs are. A lot of them don’t even crack two minutes, maybe as thrown’s way of shearing every bit of excess fat off for the leanest, most direct product possible. …well, it’s certainly lean; you’ll never get bogged down or blindsided by any kind of swerve here. You’ll also never be all that surprised because there’s no room to be. thrown seem almost entirely disinterested in anything beyond paring back metalcore to its most fundamental essence, which works fine for a tight set of beatdowns in a live environment. On an album, though—that you may have paid money for and hope to get some value from—a series of pieces that may or may not satisfyingly pay off or even stick in the brain post-runtime isn’t a great outcome.
It’s almost kind of worse that thrown aren’t, like, a travesty of a band. If you want the metalcore beats smacked to oblivion with nothing to impede that, this is a heavy, tightly-produced approximation of that. On all fronts, they do sound good, from a formidable crunch that’s never diluted or worn down, to Marcus Lundqvist often being the band’s best feature as their vocalist. Legitimately strong control of his scream can go a long way, as long as the destination is amplifying the bruiser persona of thrown. They haven’t got much else to do, anyway, so zeroing in on windmilling anger and retribution is a fine, form-fitting tactic.
Though, among all of that, you may have noticed how much more interesting thrown are to talk around than about. Yeah, believe it or not, the story of a band tacitly skyrocketing in scale off barely any music is more compelling than finding out said music is hamstrung by its limitations to a distressing degree. Big numbers only mean so much; they’re not a substitute for down-the-middle creativity. You’d hope that’d be drilled in by now, but apparently not. Apparently, some popularity and a knowledge of how to game the streaming system (not necessarily in that order) can fill in the gaps left by deep, profound mediocrity. Without either of those things, EXCESSIVE GUILT would be so lost in the shuffle that you’d need a fucking search-and-rescue team to ever find it again.
For fans of: The Ghost Inside, Stray From The Path, Counterparts
‘EXCESSIVE GUILT’ by thrown is released on 30th August on Arising Empire.
Words by Luke Nuttall
