Review Summary: Still wearing a veneer of "tough-guy" groove metal, Sylosis nevertheless makes some progress with a more focused and aggressive approach.
Sylosis's steady trend towards a NWOAHM sound, about 20 years out of the sound's heyday, has met with mixed results thus far. Cycle of Suffering kept enough of the band's trademark technicality and melodicism, but 2023's A Sign of Things to Come leant hard into a modern metalcore sound which led to it being their most boring album, well-produced though it was.
Since their last album, Josh Middleton has seemingly found his new niche as a metal production guru on Youtube. Suitably, the production of this album is excellent and far outshines most other modern albums in terms of balance, control and timbre. Even stacked against albums with much better music such as In The Court of The Dragon, The New Flesh feels radically more polished and like a lot of time was put into perfecting its details. It sounds both savage and tightly controlled, where most bands have trended towards blaring, wooden productions.
The New Flesh is not a radically different sound but is generally faster, more direct, and less melodic. Opener Beneath the Surface has no shortage of the trademarks from A Sign of Things to Come, but trades out the overblown choruses for more heft and chunk with a solid breakdown and a Machine Head-esque simplicity. Aside from brief spells of corny (sometimes even Korny?) spoken word parts and one or two silly choruses, the sound trends towards backwards-looking groove metal, such as on the pleasingly thunderous Mirror Mirror, which doesn't venture far from its verse riff but lumbers around with rage and power.
The biggest highlights are Spared From The Guillotine and Circle of Swords. The former is uneven but shows promise with its Hoffman bros-esque intro riff, rapid tempo changes, and suitably biting vocal performance, ending as the most extreme song on the album. Circle of Swords is more or less the default formula of the band but with no misteps at all, gracefully switching from technical flourishes to slamming grooves without some of the corny awkwardness of the other songs.
Said awkwardness is a weakness; there are still distractingly overblown choruses and tough-guy lyricism per the last album, but Sylosis do not have the hooky choruses that their nearest sonic contemporaries do. As a result, most of the songs on the album feel too heavily dumbed-down with dull drum grooves and a relative de-emphasis on lead guitar passages. Plenty of solos can be found here, but the melodic content through the choruses and verses is pretty minimal.
The biggest issues are in the songs which have kept the over-produced, inauthentic feel of the last album, namely Erased, Lacerations and Adorn My Throne. The former never really finds a groove due to the awkwardly paced main riff and ill-fitting chorus which feels comparatively toothless, whilst Lacerations sounds like Trivium without the hooks. Adorn My Throne is comparatively inoffensive, and the back half of the song ramps up toward a pleasant Insomnium-esque melodeath conclusion, but feels out of place with its Octane-core structure and vestigial atmospheric qualities. The album even has a token ballad in Everywhere At Once, which is not too bad, but Josh's vocals are not strong enough to carry the choruses and would have benefitted from backing harmonies to sell the emotive moments.
Josh Middleton has described the sound of the modern era of Sylosis as harkening back to the bands earliest demos prior to the release of Conclusion of an Age. Where that album did genuinely come in at the end of the NWOAHM era and signalled the end of "metalcore" referring to DevilDriver or Chimaira (you can laugh if you like at that), The New Flesh feels like a trip back in time to where the band has not found their signature sound. There are tonnes of chinks in the armour here and a fair few serious misfires, but the moments where the band locks in showcase a potent form of mainstream groove metalcore that has been long since abandoned by everyone else.
Highlights:
Beneath the Surface
The New Flesh
Circle of Swords
Spared from the Guillotine
