ALBUM REVIEW: Caskets – ‘The Only Heaven You’ll Know’

D’you reckon anyone will listen to Caskets’ new album and think it’s that AI band trained off Holding Absence that gets a million streams a month? Maybe; it’s not like much human involvement stands out on this.

Back on 2023’s Reflections, Caskets’ Holding Absence aping was at its most pronounced. The knuckle-whitening grip they had on the Welsh wunderkinds’ coattails was plain to see, and not necessarily terrible either. Even if Caskets hardly overflow with ideas of their own at the best of times, they can put together a decently emotive, blemish-free post-hardcore experience with the building blocks provided. Though, if the whole “it sounds AI-generated” quip would be unfair to Reflections, The Only Heaven You’ll Know gets no such grace. When its prime directive is to slog through the least interesting detritus of modern post-hardcore and alt-metal while making it feel faker and more impotent, how can it?

It’s astonishing, frankly, how much of a downgrade this is. Even the most fleeting, faded memories of Reflections positioned it better than the interminably boring and generic The Only Heaven You’ll Know. Not only is there now a void of unique personality to Caskets, but it’s actively eating into their ability to make something of what is there. There’s no character to speak of in the performance; that’s been leached away entirely. In its place are the same dead, hollowed-out mixes that felt like a by-product of what post-hardcore was doing in 2018. You’d think that bands of a certain level might’ve moved past this, but evidently Caskets believe they can revitalise the method by…just pushing along as it was. What’s the worst that can happen (besides a lack of energy or firepower; the same ponderous choruses that sap any lift from themselves on the title track and Make Me A Martyr; and an entire final leg that’s the most gruelling of chores to sit through)?

Again, this is marked backslide from what came before, on surface-level impressions alone. It’s one thing to be swimming in your own derivativeness; it’s another entirely to do it badly. That’s where The Only Heaven You’ll Know is teetering on, getting so lost in the overmixed sauce that it becomes actively detrimental. Sacrifice is a perfect example—a gallumphing mass of nothing, stripped of definition or dynamics, with a waifish vocal performance that’s presumably meant to be intimate and ethereal, though dousing it in half-a-dozen filters makes that impossible to grasp. There’s also What Have I Become and its onslaught of colourless synths to reduce any guitar presence to a hum, and Save Us which launches Matt Flood’s voice a good ten feet in front of everything else, therefore leaving the instrumental palette more swaddled and edgeless than usual. Top it off with an egregiously flat drum mix on almost half the album, and Caskets’ regression only seems to be speeding up.

However, there’s no more ideal case study for how The Only Heaven You’ll Know whiffs even its most nascent potential than Flood himself. As a singer, he’s arresting when dragging his emotionality into the open and not for a second longer. This is ‘Holding Absence At Home’ if there ever were such a thing, down to the regional Britrock voice that’s gotten significantly less impactful in the two-year interim (see Escape and how flat the singing becomes there). Moreover, for as impressed as Flood seems to be with his work, it seldom pans out in the way he presents it. “I’ve totally smashed my heart on my sleeve for this album,” reads one quote; “[it’s] something that’s real, raw, has real-life passion and trauma in it, something that’s catchy and believable,” says another. Ah, yes—the ol’ ‘tell, don’t show’ approach to delivery! Not to make light of such experiences, but for the weight that’s prescribed to them, it simply doesn’t get there in the final draft. In the case of Sacrifice especially, the reality of the lyrics utterly tanks in translation, as in this song about cutting off a toxic person who’d inflicted such mental anguish, any pathos, release or proclaimed ‘rawness’ is nowhere to be seen.

Peel aaaaaall of that back, and you are left with some…highlights? As an opener, Lost In The Violence sets the path up well with some fuller production and added bite. Whenever there’s a harsher growl, that’s when attention is the most grabbed, and the buzzier synths on the title track, Save Us and Broken Path are nice to have there. And that’s about it. For an act encumbered by so many limitations already, Caskets have done a fairly awful job of proving they can withstand them on The Only Heaven You’ll Know. None of this gives the impression of a band looking to break as a worldwide phenomenon, as much as one still finding their feet and figuring out how to start. Even Reflections had that in the bag, as low on creativity as that was. The Only Heaven You’ll Know compounds that and throws in a hefty slug of tiredness, on the part of Caskets themselves and the listener. You don’t want to feel like better music is possible from typing a few prompts into Suno.

For fans of: Holding Absence, Awaken I Am, Nevertel

‘The Only Heaven You’ll Know’ by Caskets is released on 7th November on Sharptone Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall