REVIEW ROUND-UP: Drain, Rise Of The Northstar, VOWER

Drain

…Is Your Friend

You know that saying “nature abhors a vacuum”? Well, music abhors one even more. For instance, when you’ve got a top player in hardcore who’s fully completed their transition to Pitchfork-rock darlings and abdicated their seat, it needs to be filled post-haste. A mighty specific example, we’ll grant you, but the ongoing indie crusade that Turnstile have wrought requires it to be addressed. Undoubtedly, plenty will be clamouring to pick up the mantle of hardcore’s sickest survivalists, but let’s be real—the honour might as well be Drain’s to take.

…Is Your Friend is the perfect audition reel for that exact outcome, their second in a row after 2023’s Living Proof put them on all the right radars. And while weighing the positives and negatives between the two is ultimately splitting hairs, …Is Your Friend is an indicator of a couple extra steps taken. For one, there’s a brawn that Drain are happy to flex, courtesy of what has to be one of the best production jobs on a hardcore album this year. When it lands upon a chug like with Scared Of Everything and Nights Like These, there’s a weight to it that can utterly annihilate. As for breakouts into quicker tempos—see the skatepark-ready Nothing But Love and the sideways glances at thrash on Loudest In The Room for premium cuts—the sensation of rocks rattling around in your skull might become even more potent. You kinda need a vocalist with as much feral-wolf energy as Sammy Ciaramitaro to front this, just to remain stylistically consistent.

The great thing about Drain on top of that is how approachable they still come across. Not accessible, necessarily (though they aren’t a million miles from that, either), but there’s a warmth about how they play and present, as if to match the colour palette of the artwork. As the album opens with the fat bass rip from Stealing Happiness From Tomorrow, the heat of ‘90s alt-nation makes itself known; get to Who’s Having Fun? later on and it’s fully taken over. As intangible a quality as it is, it’s very tactile within the makeup of …Is Your Friend. Every piece that’s not ‘traditionally’ hardcore—including a couple of short but really impactful solos—only elevates Drain further and further, building on a foundation that would already put them among the best there is.

Chiefly, though, …Is Your Friend clears so much of the competition through sheer entertainment value. Straight, steel-toed, stone-faced bravado has its limits, and Drain are producing the ideal way to blow past them while remaining true to hardcore’s ethos. Hey, just like Turnstile used to do—funny, that! If …Is Your Friend is to be Drain’s Time & Space and see them take off in the scene and beyond in the biggest possible way, it’s going about that entirely correctly. For hardcore that’s uniquely executed without the threat of indie-ficiation any time soon…well, the band name and title in concert should say all you need.

For fans of: Turnstile, Angel Du$t, Speed

‘…Is Your Friend’ by Drain is out now on Epitaph Records.

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Rise Of The Northstar

CHAPTER 04: RED FALCON SUPER BATTLE! NEO PARIS WAR!!

If it were ever in doubt that Paris’ premier band of banchos are pure enough to the cause, that title is frankly imperceptible to anyone unfamiliar with preliminary translations of anime episode names. The personal weebery of Rise Of The Northstar goes without saying, even if the weight placed on it in their output continues to slip backward. More and more, their love of Japanese pop culture is getting consigned to aesthetics alone, to where, just like their last album Showdown, a sick cover is the face, body and soul of Rise Of The Northstar’s ‘flair’ that goes untouched by its rapcore toolkit.

The good news is that CHAPTER 04…, for what it is, can still pull out some results. The baseline is street-level punch that connects with a slobberknocking thud at all times, and after four albums, Rise Of The Northstar have that on lock. It’s all meaty and heavy, and Vitia’s chest-thumping bravado muddling through his French accent is a string of personality that this band have all to themselves. There’s also the benefit of a real go-get-‘em attitude when it comes to size that Rise Of The Northstar love to pick up, whether it’s how massive Payback or Falcon feel through force alone, or the album’s most convincing Super Saiyan moment as Vitia screams to the sky in the chorus of Solitary Homeboy.

That’s all good stuff, but would it kill Rise Of The Northstar to not just stop there? Moreover, it’s replicated exactly from Showdown, only millimetres between them for where that endpoint is. If anything, CHAPTER 04… flaunts the French side of Rise Of The Northstar more than anything Japanese. Its guests are LANDMVRKS’ Florent Salfati and ten56.’s Aaron Matts (an honorary Frenchman but nonetheless), alongside instances of Vitia rapping in his mother tongue that are the album’s most ear-catching spots by far. So perhaps there’s a little more going on, but not in the way that Rise Of The Northstar will advertise. The lion’s share of this is functional rap-metal and rapcore, fit for purpose with spice deprioritised. And yeah, that is disappointing. It would be anyway when the anime and manga shtick is so forwardly presented, but the fact that it appears to be the standard now sends the enthusiasm around this band into a tailspin.

Rise Of The Northstar leave CHAPTER 04… as just another roughnecked hardcore band, the last thing they should strive to be. Despite how competently they pull that off, a big piece of their prescribed identity is still missing, and explicitly so. The odd lyrical references (that aren’t always apparent, at that) don’t fill the gaping holes alone; there’s clearly something else that’s supposed to be here that just isn’t. And while that continues to be the case, Rise Of The Northstar can only seem so impressive. If you’re actively investing time into this, chances are you’re after much more than ‘just-fine hardcore’.

For fans of: Hatebreed, Deez Nuts, Get The Shot

‘CHAPTER 04: RED FALCON SUPER BATTLE! NEO PARIS WAR!!’ by Rise Of The Northstar is released on 14th November on Kuromaku Corp.

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VOWER

A Storm Lined With Silver

This was always going to be the point that VOWER really needed to nail. Palm Reader and Black Peaks alumni and a strong debut in Apricity caused the right eyes to bug out of heads, hurtling VOWER towards becoming Britcore’s next it-band. A tad prematurely, perhaps. Sure, a confluence of excellent factors is tempting to buy into right away, but perhaps dial it back until there’s more than a four-song EP, yeah? Well, now we have a grand total of 10 songs to go off, and…okay, you can’t start believing the hype again. Believe it more, if anything; A Storm Lined With Silver is just that much of a step up.

To put it simply, everything that was good about VOWER last time has been cranked up immensely. The prog side is deeper; the post-hardcore hits harder; the knitting together of the two is basically flawless now. It’s all noticeable, as well; there isn’t some incremental creep upwards. Just take the opener Dawn In Me for starters, a raised waterline of confidence for VOWER to casually broach the six-minute mark on their first track, while also drilling down for this lower, meaner, quasi-Deftones groove. And that’s the standard set on A Storm Lined With Silver, leaning into the enormity in its creators’ very genes.

Perhaps a little more can be differentiate some of these songs in terms of pace, but often, you’ll be too enamoured by what’s going on to care. In specific moments, there’s some jaw-dropping work going on—the leap into outer wilds towards the end of Moth Becomes The Flame is one (a special shoutout going to Liam Kearley’s drumming); the careful swell outwards of Serpent to round out is another. The grip on crescendo and wringing out every molecule of potential from that is VOWER’s calling card on here. They’re blessed with some incredible production for it, and Josh McKeown’s vocals have never sounded more fluid for the respective heights and depths he’s expected to reach.

On all fronts, VOWER are simply crushing it more than ever. Apricity was never liable to be a fluke, not with the proven pedigree onboard, but now that there’s tactile evidence that not only proves it as the norm but builds further, you can justify all of that excitement fully. A full album is the next step, though don’t construe that with moving the goalposts further. VOWER have proven themselves in spades on A Storm Lined With Silver, and replicating (or even further improving) on that on a long-form scale could make something properly majestic. For now, though, a new stratum in excellence has been infiltrated.

For fans of: Black Peaks, Deftones, Palm Reader

‘A Storm Lined With Silver’ by VOWER is released on 14th November.

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Words by Luke Nuttall