Beyond Grace – Our Kingdom Undone (Review)

This is the second album from UK death metallers Beyond Grace.

2014’s Monstrous showed buckets of promise, which 2017’s debut album Seekers delivered upon. It’s now 2021 and Beyond Grace have returned with 47 minutes of new material. Is the time well spent?

Put simply, yes.

Beyond Grace play a modern, atypical brand of technical death metal. Theirs is a jagged, warped style, yet one that still manages to come off as surprisingly organic and warm.

The songs are heavy and full of riffs, with the sort of pummelling groove that can knock down walls. There is also a technicality here that is non-standard, and sometimes dissonant. It adds an additional level to the songs and helps steer much of the songwriting away from traditional structuring, and into more challenging, yet more rewarding waters.

These songs are very enjoyable. It’s clear a lot of time, energy, and passion has gone into these tracks. All of the the instruments get their time to shine, and frequently all at once. The guitars are as agile and as full of technical wizardry as you would expect, but I also find myself focusing on the bass and drums more than is normal. Both of these are very well-performed, and both deliver a satisfying experience and work well together. I should also commend the singer’s performance, as he can never be accused of being one-dimensional or lacking in vision. Raw and passionate, his vocals complement and enhance the music greatly.

Beyond Grace may essentially play death metal, but it’s death metal of a more cerebral, intelligent nature. The music is well-considered and intelligently-crafted, pushing the album up to a higher level than that of a standard, more generic death metal release. The music is also emotive and intricate in ways that most death metal is not. It can feel unexpectedly intimate, which is not a feeling generally associated with death metal. There is an emotional depth and awareness here that’s very gratifying, and Our Kingdom Undone benefits from this considerably.

Ultimately though, this is death metal, and as such, Our Kingdom Undone can also rend and rip itself fiercely out of the speakers with potent aggression when it wants to. Intelligent and emotive death metal it may be, but it can still claw your face off.

Beyond Grace’s second album is a success, and I couldn’t be happier with the band’s progress and development since Monstrous.

What are you waiting for? Listen to this as soon as you can.