ALBUM REVIEW: Motionless In White – ‘Decades’

An overlooked factor in what’s ultimately doing modern metalcore in is the insistence on self-seriousness. Every album has to be a calamitous, stone-faced deep-dive into an interchangeably tortured psyche, only to circle the drain when it’s nothing close to as probing as it believes. An immediate tilt in the total opposite direction is, under no circumstances, a reliable remedy—God knows the 2010s spawned some heinous cringe that never needs to be exhumed—but there is a medium.

It’s why, in the wake of Ice Nine Kills’ complete steamrolling of the scene, Motionless In White benefit a lot from some reevaluation. They’ve got character; they’ve got power; they’ve got some grasp on the ‘metal’ component of ‘metalcore’; and, most importantly, they know how to make it all work in tandem. Some waxing and waning in popularity has never obscured the event that Motionless In White always aim for with new music. It’s big, blockbuster metalcore that’s fully aware of that; depth is no object when it comes to this band’s best. If it were, would they end the standard edition of this album with a cover of Corey Hart’s Sunglasses At Night, effectively unchanged from the original and only looking as though it’s here because it’s a fun idea?

That seems to be the M.O. with Decades, which isn’t the greatest hits album that its name implies, but is representative of the core spread that makes up Motionless In White. Its default is to sound larger than life, in a hammered-together collection of Information Age metalcore, industrial and the occasional goth stimulus. That being the primary driver is not hidden in the slightest, either. Glance at song titles like log_in//crash_out, Blood Rave or Love At First Bite and try to rationalise the weighty artistic subtleties behind them. You can’t, ‘cause there are none.

And let’s be perfectly clear on that—that’s simply a statement, not a criticism. For what it is, Motionless In White do it well, at no point more so than when it’s consolidated into a hulking monolith of it and it alone. Afraid Of The Dark is as boilerplate as their big-chorus fare gets, but just like the likes of Reincarnate and Eternally Yours before it, you can practically hear the supercharging going on beneath the hood. R.I.P, meanwhile, seems determined to emphasise emo-ballad slush via its greyscale production and Skylar Grey feature, but that hook is an utter monster and kinda derails any impetus to hate this. Not that there isn’t the occasional regrettable idea—hello All That I’ve Ever Known with your dubstep break in 2026—but they’re pleasingly rare.

At the same time, Decades will not, under any circumstances, bring the unconvinced to Motionless In White’s cause. (In fact, in the case of Sunglasses At Night, it’s so alien to this band’s usual fare that even the fans might raise an eyebrow.) But at the same time, you can still recognise the higher level that Motionless In White operate on. Chris Motionless has a hell of a scream on him, even holding his own alongside Corey Taylor on Playing God. Production, for the most part, is significantly higher than average, too, letting some real metallic crunch take the lead and genuinely crushing in its best moments.

In other words, it’s a Motionless In White album, but a pretty good one for how much of their repertoire still works. There’s enough of a fun factor and powerhouse bent in complementary amounts to make Decades a success, perhaps even more so than some of their past works. And while it’s still nothing special, it’s good to have a heavy-hitter like this still existing in metalcore. Something to bat away the onslaught of dour, dreary nothingness that metalcore has become is always appreciated, and on Decades, Motionless In White always seem capable of obliging.

For fans of: Ice Nine Kills, Bring Me The Horizon, Dark Divine

‘Decades’ by Motionless In White is released on 17th July on Roadrunner Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall