Review Summary: "Burn it all down."
New Years Day are a caricature of themselves. Talented, but insular. Nothing they churn out at this point has much right or reason to exist beyond filling their discography. They're gothic, brooding and edgy. You can probably find a t-shirt baring their logo at Hot Topic or their music at a WWE event. It's all a big
spectacle. And it all starts with frontwoman Ash Costello. The only thing more unflattering than her aestheticizing of mental illness and abuse in the lyrics is her grating and painfully limited vocals. Her voice sounded a lot prettier years ago (see 2013's catchy as hell
Victim to Villain), but it has deteriorated to the point that her shouty, bitey snarls have to compensate for lack of range and personality in her performance. The instrumentals, meanwhile, are often times energetic and competently executed, if a bit dime-a-dozen for a group that plays to the specific flavor of gothic hard rock that they do.
Half Black Heart, the band's first outing in half a decade, is repetitive to a jarring degree. Almost every riff shoehorns in a distorted squeal, the drums often play fifth banana, the presentation sounds dated, and the production takes a hatchet to Costello's already dismal singing with copious amounts of reverb, autotune, editing and various electronic bells and whistles. The lyrics might be the biggest offender, though. On the title track, Ash is celebrating the fact that she's damaged goods while also asking a nameless adversary why they tell her "what to be", as if she isn't a grown woman with any agency of her own. On "Hurts Like Hell", she's relishing in the fact that her muse abuses her and that as much as she wishes she "could hate you," she's addicted to the pain. Suffice to say, it's not flattering in the slightest. The way she seemingly glamorizes the song's subject matter over what try to be semi-danceable choruses is gimmicky at best and unsettling at worst.
"Fearless" is what you get when you ask an AI generator to write a Black Veil Brides song. You know how it goes by now; "You can't control me", "you can't stop me", "it's in my blood to fight back." I might be willing to let Ash straight-face it if she wasn't pushing 40 years old and still producing less lyrical depth than f*cking Simple Plan. Elsewhere, "I Still Believe" retreads the exact same ground, but with tedious radio rock tendencies to boot. "Creature of Habit" caps things off with the most sexually unruly vibes you'll find anywhere on the album. New Years Day are no stranger to playing up Costello's sex appeal, but her laughably bad vocals prevent it from being as fun as it could have been.
The songs that comprise
Half Black Heart bleed into each other unceasingly. Equal parts boring and cringe-inducing. There's no ebb and flow. There's no story to tell. Nothing stands out except the band's ill-suited frontwoman, who does little but give her male fans something to objectify and her female fans something to stan uncritically. They used to have potential. I remember their earlier work fondly as exciting and mildly enthralling alt metal. But they've regressed to novelty. No fans will be won or lost here. Take all the most tired tropes of this genre, throw them in a blender and you get New Years Day, an SNL spoof of a scene band, neon lights, skeletons and all.
