Enterprise Earth – The Chosen (Review)

This is the fourth album from US metal/deathcore band Enterprise Earth.

Enterprise Earth walk a line between modern death metal, deathcore, and metalcore, and on The Chosen the band deliver a whopping 71 minutes of meaty material for listeners to get their teeth into.

The songs are thick slabs of aggressive brutality, shot through with the occasional streaks of ambience, melody, and emotive colour. Enterprise Earth combine daemonic intensity with angelic melody, and do so with great aplomb. The trappings of both death metal and deathcore be heard across these songs, alongside a healthy dose of Slipknot-esque/metalcore stadium-friendly catchy heaviness. Enterprise Earth mix these ingredients together with skill, resulting in songs that take strengths from all of them, from the extreme to the accessible.

There’s a lot of catchiness on here, and so many hooks that you could do yourself an injury. The more commercial side of the music allows the band to pen songs that stick in the mind, while the more extreme side allows them to go in for the kill with furious intensity. There are some damn good riffs on here, as well as some equally good guitar solos and leads. These components are lesser-seen in deathcore, which is why the band’s death metal influences are so important, especially as they’re tied in with the deathcore ones so well. Of the latter, there are plenty of crushing breakdowns to get smashed up by too.

A range of paces and moods are used, as you would hope for such a lengthy album. The songs are well-written and benefit from a variety of creative ideas and musical flourishes across the album’s running time. As well as the main three styles mentioned above, we also get bits of melodic death metal, black metal, industrial, progressive metal, heavy metal, and sludge metal here and there. It all adds up to a very compelling and enjoyable collection of tracks that manages to hold the listener’s attention, despite the album’s considerable running time.

The murderous vocals of the singer consist of all kinds of growls, screams, cleans, shouts, and other vocalisations. The singer’s voice is nothing of not impressive, and his performance is top tier.

The Chosen is a monster of an album. It successfully bridges the gap between extreme metal and the more commercial metal styles, making the most of both ends of the spectrum to produce a killer set of songs.

Very highly recommended.