Review Summary: A tug-of-war between two sonic identities with no clear winner.
Comeback albums are always difficult to release because of expectations. After 17 years, the artists themselves have undoubtedly grown both musically and as people, to the point where they might look back on their career and find out they don't have or need to express the same feelings as they did when they started out. If they still have the drive though, they might just as well write whatever they come up with at present with no preconceptions about how they should sound. But what about the fans? Poison the Well has always had a peculiar, bifurcated fanbase. There's your OG metalcore fans that loved the raw aggressiveness and emotion from the first two albums (which had a definitive impact on the scene) and then raised their eyebrows when "You Come Before You" promptly broke the constraints of that musical mold. Then there are the ones who swear that change is what made the band unique, leading to a trilogy completed by "Versions" and "The Tropic Rot" that continued to expand on the hinted experimentation from YCBY and further moved away from their angst-y origins. With a discography this eclectic, how do both parts manage expectations—especially when they're sky high from both sides?
The comforting side of the truth is that "Peace in Place" feels like a natural evolution of the band's sound. They pick up where they left off, further streamlining the successful formula they found with YCBY. The classic elements are all there: the crunchy and distinctive twangy guitars, the spaghetti-western ambiance, the almost tribal thumping rhythm of the drums, the ethereal crooning, a very pissed-off big guy shouting at the top of his lungs... and something new. Something that can almost single-handedly sour such a tasty recipe.
In what feels like an effort to "modernize" their sound up to 2026's standards, the band enlisted Will Putney as a producer, mixing and mastering engineer. That name has the power to conjure both the most fervent devotion and the most repellent disgust. In the name of fairness, I will say this: Will Putney's production style can fit a band like a tight rubber glove or like an oven mitt. Some of the bands he worked with in the past have successfully embraced this aesthetic and made it a core part of their sound—not only Putney's own bands (Fit For an Autopsy and END) but also some, at the time, upcoming bands like Vein, Knocked Loose, Silent Planet and Northlane. These are examples where the symbiotic process has clearly worked as expected, making band and producer sound almost like a single entity that the fans came to love.
On the other hand, "one size doesn't fit all." Putney has a clear-cut style, and when that style is applied to bands with an already established distinct sound, results can range from mediocre to even detractive to the original concept. On "Peace in Place", we witness a strange variation of this phenomenon: Putney is placed like the proverbial oven mitt on top of PTW's established formula, homogenizing and smoothing to a certain degree the intricacies of the band's quirkiest traits, but then those same traits often break through the fabric and show their true colors, making this a decidedly "frankenstein'd" effort.
When the album starts off with "Wax Mask," one could almost be fooled into thinking the band had gone back to their roots, with a nostalgic callback to the intro from the very popular "Botchla." That lasts about 30 seconds, and then we're trusted into full-on Putneyland. It's not that the guitars' chugs and dissonant chords are wholly alien to the PTW sound—hell, they originally made their name off of those—but this sound could have come from any of the previously mentioned bands that Putney produced, and no one would have noticed the difference. Thankfully, the true spirit of the bands manages to shine through at some points, although how brightly it shines varies wildly from song to song—the very first chorus we hear on the album has vocalist Jeff Moreira drowned out by a heap of reverb and ambience, leaving his evocative voice muffled and robbed of much of its impact. "Primal Bloom" doesn't do much more to ensure confidence—the more mellow part of the band's sound makes an appearance throughout the song, only to be headbutted by the seemingly out-of-place heavy riffs that modern metalcore has standardized. We're only on track two, but already we have a slowed-down breakdown at the end. Oh joy.
Thankfully, by the time "Thoroughbreds" starts, fans of their most recent works can breathe a bit in relief because this is a bonafide classic PTW track. The chorus is infinitely catchy, the guitars go full-cowboy mode... Even the seemingly standard breakdown works because the band has the writing chops to incorporate it into a broader palette and make it sound different. "Everything Hurts" follows closely the same path of revisiting the band's recent output, this time the more laid-back and mellow cuts. Putney still manages to peek here and there, but not even the lazy breakdown (yes, another one) manages to take away from the overall quality of this one. "Weeping Tones" shifts the gears up with a more energetic approach and what is probably the most memorable line on the album sung in the chorus: "Erased our roles to regain control /Â*So now I breathe only when told." Near the end, the band once again takes a formulaic breakdown and makes it much more emotive with their own interpretation.
The first 5 seconds of "A Wake of Vultures" demonstrate another serious issue with Putney's particular treatment of individual instruments: over-compression. Chris Hornbrook is nothing but a fantastically dynamic drummer, and yet here it sounds like someone programmed a drum part on their computer with all velocities set to the max value, with no regard to dynamics. Here it's apparent because the drums play alone for those 5 seconds, but the compression problem is present throughout the whole album, especially on the drums and bass. What is intended to make the sound "heavier" only makes it more hollow. Go figure. That aside, the track itself is another great example of the band's creative side being free to do whatever it wants to and sounding genuinely great in the process, even with the omnipresent Putney's touch. Weirdly enough, the last minute is compromised by a twangy guitar number that could have very well stood on its own and served as the basis of a proper track (similar to some tracks in "Versions"), but here it is presented as an afterthought. A shame, really.
"Bad Bodies" presents a more straightforward piece, stylistically veering more towards 90s hardcore. The chorus serves as a highlight, but here I have to pause to meditate on something: all of the choruses in the album so far have caught my ear in a pleasant way, but by this point I started to notice an eerie similarity to another band PTW practically grew alongside—Deftones. Now, obviously, the chasm in popularity between the two is gigantic, but they started around the same time, so it would make sense for them to share some commonalities. However, I never noticed previously on their whole discography any obvious parallels. Moreira's clean style has always had a substantial amount of crooning, but it always had a distinct flavor. But this chorus had me sifting through the previous choruses on the album and realizing a significant portion of them, both vocally and instrumentally, sound closer to a modern Deftones record rather than the unique style PTW had going for them so far. This could in part be attributed to the modernization of their sound, which can arguably be called "updated" for today's musical reality, but it still hurts to see such a unique facet of the band conform to standards set by other bands.
The album hits a peak with "Drifting Without End," which, contrary to its title, sees the band laser-focused with honing in on their particular strengths from the last releases. A slower, more controlled approach does wonders for the impact of the track, constantly building momentum and then releasing tension during the choruses, with the last chorus arguably having the best emotional payoff on the whole album.
Strange then how, after such a climactic moment, the album then plods along with two (in reality three) more songs that do absolutely no favors for the pacing. "Melted" feels like the band is in stylistic limbo with its constant switching between spacey bits and Putney's flavor-of-the-month heavy moments. The only impression this track left on me was that the breakdown at 1:46 is probably the most boring piece of metalcore I've heard in quite a while—something I never imagined I would say about a PTW album, indeed!
A decidedly weird closer is what we get with "Plague Them The Most." What starts out with a very promising eerie mix of Moreira's unique brand of slightly deranged crooning and an unsettling vibe provided by a droning guitar and some marching-like drums soon encounters the same pitfalls the rest of the album has in regard to sudden transitions between PTW's traditional style and Putney's penchant for that "in-your-face" heaviness. What's worse, lasting only three minutes, the song doesn't even have time to develop a proper character (despite the very cool vocal harmonies at the end that are a clear callback to Moreira's singing style from the first two albums). Three minutes, yes. Because no matter how you want to paint it, "Plague Them The Most" and "Mercedes" (the hidden track at the end after three whole minutes of silence) couldn't be farther apart in tone. Similarly to the last minute of "A Wake of Vultures," here we witness the more laid-back nature of the band (which has probably been present in one way or another since their inception), which hearkens back to "The Tropic Rot" with its lush textures and dreamy vibe, ending with a slightly heavier outro that really feels like it's trying to be the natural conclusion to the album. While the intention is good, the somewhat awkward placement of the track in this streaming age and its less-than-stellar payoff hampers the delivery.
In essence, "Peace in Place" is an album capable of both exceeding and failing to meet expectations. No one expected any breakthrough vocal delivery, but still Moreira's melodies are infectious as ever, and his screams haven't lost as much bite as it would have seemed (his vocal range seems to have taken a bit of a hit in the last decade or so, though in the studio there are ways to counter that). No one expected them to please everyone, yet what we see on offer here provides delicacies for fans of pretty much any PTW era. At the same time, while the sentiment for Putney's production seems to generally sit on extreme ends of the spectrum (with some hyperbole thrown in for good measure), the squeaky clean and in-your-face compressed sound that worked wonders for some bands with a particular style almost never helps in bringing the best out of the songs—in fact, it has seeped its way into the very song structures and taken away much of the distinctiveness (and ironically, the edge) the last three albums had.
Peace does not seem to be, in fact, in place at this particular juncture in the band's career, mostly because there is a sonic conflict between two opposing forces—the quirky, offhand approach through which the band interprets their unique perspective of metalcore and the looming threat of the need to appease an audience that, for quite some time, has been force-fed the idea that music needs to be loud to be "heavy." I hope that in the future, Poison The Well maintain their creative consciousness intact and just write whatever the hell they can conjure without outside constraints or impositions—it's that attitude that has brought to life some truly genre-defining records. Alas, expectations are hard to manage and meet, as Moreira himself admits in "A Wake of Vultures":
"I want a different me, I want a different you
I wanna know exactly what we built
It became a cage
Showed up to plague us
Don't slow down, the seconds are wasted
Hello, they're waiting"
