Okay, let’s just rip the bandage off now—after entire album cycles of trying to cope and rationalise how “this is the one that’ll finally stick”, maybe Bury Tomorrow simply don’t have another one in ‘em. In the 13 years since The Union Of Crowns, hope and faith have really been the core tenets in keeping this enterprise afloat. You might perceive great, powerful, regal metalcore in the exact moment you’re listening to it, but any time afterward? It’s never lasted. And yet, time and time again, Bury Tomorrow have had their chances. Perhaps this isn’t an ‘allowed to fail’ situation, because none of their albums have been truly bad. Rather, they may have been seen as more reliable than they actually are.
Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience is different, though. It’s the first Bury Tomorrow album in a while (maybe even ever) that’s not getting a pass on some extrapolated merit. A bit of character development from your old pals at The Soundboard there? Perhaps, but that’s also only half the story. See, compared to the others, something about this album in particular seems…off. Mid-listen—where Bury Tomorrow have always been given the most deserved grace—there isn’t the same captivation with Will You Haunt Me…, and it’s certainly not coming about afterwards, either. Maybe Bury Tomorrow finally appear to be running out of steam, and finding the smokescreen that’s been around them for over a decade beginning to dissipate.
To be fair, it’s still not terrible. Like, have you heard how awful metalcore can be? Most of the genre jokes and no-marks would kill multiple times over to sound like this. But we’re also talking about Bury Tomorrow here, a band who, at their best, are in a weight class that the dullards would find completely unattainable. It might be a case of comical serendipity the opener To Dream, To Forget features lines like “I’m just a shell of my former self” and “The fire’s extinguished but the embers are glowing”, ‘cause it sure seems accurate! It’s actually difficult to remember a time when Bury Tomorrow have felt this small and unimportant. They’ve often been able to, at the very least, walk the walk of metal giants, but even that’s gone now.
In its place is a variety of six-out-of-ten metalcore songs that don’t even feel gassed up enough to stretch beyond that. Bury Tomorrow are usually predictable; this time, they’re predictable and weighed down by it. And it’s more of a collection of cuts than anything openly huge. For instance, there are actually flaws to bring up in Dani Winter-Bates’ delivery sometimes, the head honcho with routinely one of the best screams in the metalcore biz. His lion’s roar is still there for the majority, but it can be really distracting to at last hear such an implacable presence falter, like how choppy and unconvincing the verge-of-tears scream on What If I Burn? is, or how the front end of Yōkai feels oddly lacking in control.
But it’s Tom Prendergast who’s the most obvious lodestone in this current incarnation. He was on The Seventh Sun in 2023, though the ephemeral nature of Bury Tomorrow albums means that any memories of him doing something like vanished in record time. Here, though, there’s a bit to chew on. He did, in fact, seem like an element of ‘weakness’ on The Seventh Sun, and that’s been blown out immensely on Will You Haunt Me…. His higher register and style of voice are evocative of the early-2010s metalcore bands that were time deemed just as forgettable, though for different reasons (hint: it’s because they were bad). Meanwhile, he’s bringing keys and synths to the fold that have never felt necessary for Bury Tomorrow to have. ‘Watered-down’ is probably a strong term, but you get the sense it isn’t inaccurate on a song like Silence Isn’t Helping Us, painted in a shade of airy, light grey by its atmosphere and the softly processed beat that practically begs you to forget it. It’s unfortunate that Prendergast is doing all of this while still in the shadow of Jason Cameron, a performer who understood Bury Tomorrow’s notion of strength far more effectively.
Remember, though—“The fire’s extinguished but the embers are glowing”. Even clearly down to the wick, Bury Tomorrow aren’t totally snuffed out yet, which is an admirable trait, if nothing else. Their friends in While She Sleeps pride themselves on the same sort of perseverance, albeit in a way that misunderstood a lot of what worked about them on Self Hell. Bury Tomorrow, luckily, retain some general awareness on this. They’re primed to spin out all the greatest hits again for Villain Arc and Waiting, including some of the more technically-minded melodeath guitar work on Forever The Night and Silence Isn’t Helping Us. It’s seldom mixed to be as heavy as in the past, but never do Bury Tomorrow feel without deference to what worked for them previously. And that’s generally…okay for them. Depending on the day, you could easily engineer that into a criticism, chastising the band who’ve only been able to craft that approach into a long-term memorable album once, but…come on, let’s be fair. That side of performance and execution was never where Bury Tomorrow’s issues were.
No, it was the fact that it could be really unmemorable after the umpteenth iteration of the same thing, even if you tried to physically crowbar it into your hippocampus. And for whatever reason, Bury Tomorrow have never addressed that. You might think, then, that Will You Haunt Me… is their attempt at doing just that, trying for something a little fresher and changed-up without a full-on reinvention. But if anything, that just reveals how precarious Bury Tomorrow’s creative state is. It’s fitting for a band who came up in that early-2010s metalcore generation, only sporting the inhuman strength to withstand its expected collapse. Will You Haunt Me…, of all their albums, feels the most like exactly that. Maybe, then, it’s due a minute or two in the nostalgia window, where Bury Tomorrow can bask in some form of warmth that showed them off so astoundingly in the first place. Or maybe that’s the kind of wishful thinking that kept them insulated for long enough to end up in a state like this.
For fans of: While She Sleeps, Bleed From Within, Fit For A King
‘Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience’ by Bury Tomorrow is released on 16th May on Sony Music.
Words by Luke Nuttall
