Warforged are a death metal band from the US and this is their second album.
Warforged bring us a death metal hybrid that mixes technical, progressive, experimental, and atmospheric elements into a 46-minute ever-changing monster.
Warforged offer something slightly different in their death metal. Theirs is a modern brand of extremity, one laced with all manner of different textures, styles, sounds, and ideas. Each song has its own personality and character. Warforged throw everything they have into The Grove | Sundial, and it mostly works out well.
The songs are progressive, experimental, and nonstandard. They employ a range of atypical riffs to assault your ears from every direction, but it’s not just the guitars that have been pushed to their limits. You can hear a broad variety of metal and non-metal influences in the music. Deathcore rubs shoulders with progressive metal. Avant-garde elements and electronica collide. Technical wizardry bleeds into ambient introspection, while atmosphere and brutality vie for dominance. This is an album that demands multiple listens to truly start to fall into place.
The multifaceted vocal approach works very well, with the range of voices and singing styles adding extra flavour to the music.
Smash together bands such as Rivers of Nihil, Thy Art Is Murder, Meshuggah, Between the Buried and Me, The Faceless, Obscura, Vulvodynia, and Gorod, and the resulting debris should sound loosely a bit like what you’ll find on The Grove | Sundial.
Warforged’s new album is a challenging collection of ideas, sounds, beauty, brutality, and harsh distortion. It remains still just long enough to make an impact, before mutating into another variant of extreme metal mayhem.
Highly recommended, but not for those wanting a safe ride.
Wonderbox Metal 