ALBUM REVIEW: Dying Wish – ‘Flesh Stays Forever’

If at once the title of Dying Wish’s latest, Flesh Stays Together, hints at positivity, vocalist Emma Boster immediately strikes that down:“We wanted it to feel hopeless. Like, we’re so fucked. There’s hardly a positive message, if any at all, on the record.” That’s certainly substantiated by its violent artwork, but it also adds gravitas to the emotional heft that’s already elevated their take on primetime metalcore.

I mean that term in the most positive sense, of course. In the mid-2000s that 5-7-8 Drop C style à la Lamb Of God, As I Lay Dying and Killswitch Engage was king, retrospectively both lauded and memed by Nik Nokturnal and the extended music YouTube lot. There was so much merit to that formula that straddled the tightrope of European death metal riffage and neck-busting breakdown. When done right, of course, before metalcore felt the curse of overproduction and Architects’ bottom-string worship copied and pasted to oblivion. For all the swerves and brilliance of the genre’s enduring and ‘new’ acts (Counterparts and Knocked Loose respectively), that dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-chug-chug sound of a simpler time needed a fresh home. That’s when Dying Wish came to fulfill the slot, and smashed it.

Since 2016 Dying Wish have taken that throwback sound, thrown it into a murky pit and seen it reemerge as a different pissed-off beast. The lived experience in every uttered snarl from Boster is palpable to devastating effect, the production keeping up with Jeff Yambra’s hardcore speed and Pedro Carrillo and Sam Reynolds’ familiar yet welcome melodic riffage. So much so that Drowning In The Silent Black remains maybe my personal favourite metalcore song of the past five years, even when they only got more streamlined on Symptoms Of Survival. That track carries their debut’s full-on ferocity all up to that phenomenally sung chorus that scratches a serious nostalgic serious itch. Incidentally, that song has still remained a standout ‘clean vocal’ performance from Boster, where the ‘more singing, more heavy’ mantra was a key aim for Flesh Stays Together. Duly with Will Putney on production, it’s heavily gothic in mood and downright filthy in sound.

Their writing inspirations do feel like they infiltrated the eventual product successfully: Ethel Cain’s Southern Gothic Americana-cum-experimental noise, the misunderstood anger of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and the general unhealthy climate we live in. Away from Drop C chipper riffage, Carillo, Reynolds and Jon Massey’s axes sound hewn out of volcanic rock. They sound mammoth-like, sludgy even on A Curse Upon Iron to accompany Boster comparing our real world—“Symptoms of a diseased system / Infections spread, everyone is a victim”—to the mythic; “Bodies rise, towers fall / Faith in gold has cursed us all”. The darkness of the instrumentals entwine with the ill-fated lyricism across the board. “I no longer fucking care what comes next” Boster rounds off with the bludgeoning outro on I’ll Know You’re Not Around, and “I promise to be nothing like you when I hate myself the most” is delivered tear-jerkingly on Nothing Like You. Managing to take some ice-cold metalcore swagger into a ballad isn’t easy, but this breaks up the flow and crushes all the same. When those background string bends precede the tempo that kicks up a gear…

A similar effect is captured on the closer’s destructively beautiful sentiment “I’d massacre all of heaven for you”, yet it’s not to say there isn’t pit fuel that you’d want from this incendiary live act. Empty The Chamber is another display of Dying Wish’s inherent knack for a sub-3 minute metalcore jam, Revenge In Carnage does the absolute business by introducing the song with its name (why don’t more artists do that?), and Surrender Everything has a nasty bass section, double speed, and an “APOCALYPSE BOUND, GO!” pit call. Hard.

In that way, everything you could really ask for from the group is here: raw emotion and musicality, when so well channelled through gnarly breaks shows the potential timelessness that this sort of music usually struggles with. It can dip close to the expected, but there’s clearly a stepped-up confidence in varying the pace here, and it never detracts from sheer impact this five-piece have always brought in droves. So long as there’s the world’s ills to be put to rights, we’ll hopefully have this group sticking together to portray our collectively-felt frustration, and breathe life into the scene that felt built to help us do that in the first place.

For fans of: Orthodox, Kublai Khan TX, The Acacia Strain

‘Flesh Stays Forever’ by Dying Wish is released on 26th September on Sharptone Records.

Words by Elliot Burr