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One of their releases.

Yes, it's true, by the year 2025 hardcore music is more popular than metal. So what? When did Turnstile was ever "hardcore" in the first place? Why their 2025 album Never Enough starts with what sounds like New Age/Ambient synth pads with extremely Auto-tuned vocals like Sleep Token? So much for hardcore. By now, the band's style has become so abruptly charts-oriented that now they may as well erase all guitar/bass from their recordings. Apart of this pseudo-mystic The Smashing Pumpkins imitation, the rest of the album is devoted to off-beat Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes-like Pop Punk ("Sole", "Sunshower"), clean, ultra-chorus guitar with high-tempo beats as if everyone pretended The Smiths never existed ("I Care", save for the vocal lines), nods to Ska Punk ("Dreaming", synth brass included) and more pseudo-slam breakdowns so basic even old Rage Against the Machine were on another level ("Dull"). And why many solo synth pads take up a full half of the songs themselves? Is this band "punk" or "shoegaze"? And why, when Hundredth do this exact same stuff, no one notices?

2025's Insatiable contains more concise, instrumental, digital synth/Doom Metal drones with more focused on "otherwordly" distortion than care in arrangements or concept.

2025's I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me contains defective mixing with extremely loud, distorted vocals (enough to bury every other instruments far below) or extremely loud lead guitar (during the solos), in addition to epic-oriented guitar/string/choir arrangements more suited to Blind Guardian, Septicflesh and Arcturus/Dimmu Borgir than anything else. For the rest, this is another hour-long replica of their previous Dark Funeral/Behemoth plagiarizing over and over, featuring the same hyper-blast drumming, Ambient/Post-Rock pads, jolly Blackgaze riffing derived from In Flames, Swallow the Sun and Sojourner ("In Darkness", where blast-beating is actually detrimental, "Glenwood", which has the exact same chord changes of "In Darkness" and "Unbreakable combined) and triton-based breakdowns over and over. All extreme spectacle and no substance.

Highlights: "War Machine".

1985's New Day Rising contains even more distorted guitar overkill, and granted the band accusations of "selling out" due to increased amount of polished sheen and Pop songwriting (if only they had known what would become of punk in the 90's!): obviously, there's no polished sheen to be found anywhere, just equalization more focused on treble frequencies and a sound possibly even more abrasive than Zen Arcade.

If Zen Arcade was an experiment in catharsis in depression and accepting the world's flaws, New Day Rising sounds like the parody of listing the world's beautiful things. The title track is just an introductory hardcore slam with repetitive, lobotomized chanting, "The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill" has E-minor bass lines and riffing derived from Joy Division, and "I Apologize" is a happy-go-lucky G-major stomp with more "lucid" vocals and Country/Pop arrangements. "Folk Lore" has great lyrics about societal changes in USA society with the passing of time, "Celebrated Summer" has acoustic guitar breaks and propulsive D-major strumming that signal the birth of Emo-core, "How to Skin a Cat" is a dissonant, chromatic No Wave drone with metaphoric lyrics revolving over the flaws of cyclic economy, while "Books About UFOs" sounds purposefully terrible, having swinging C-major beats and childish, piano/vocals akin to T.Rex and 70's glam to satirize on obsession over conspiracy theories ("I'm going to turn into a lens and focus all my attention / On finding a new planet and naming it right after her").

On a vocal stance, this album has Mould at his worst performance ever, containing even more throat-shredding venom and hyper-active dynamics that destroy the album's melodic mood. When he goes soft, as on the hushed acoustic strumming of "Perfect Example" (where distorted guitar is pushed in the background) or the tempo-changed "59 Times the Pain" (where also Hart really struggles with playing), he sounds even more drunken than everywhere else, literally falling flat on the floor in emotional terms. While the album nods to increased melody and singer-songwriter route, the inconstant, imprecise performance, the shabby recording (does "Powerline" ever has vocals? 'Cause only distant echo can be heard) and the fact several of the lesser songs sound like mere variation of "Celebrated Summer" results in an inferior release with even more unfocused songwriting and containing some of the worst vocals ever recorded into a Pop/Rock album.

Highlights: "New Day Rising", "Celebrated Summer", "How to Skin a Cat".

A pivotal band in the development of modern Pop/Rock music, USA's Hüsker Dü didn't score major hits during their career in the 80's despite working with major label Warner Records, but got such a fervent support from the underground community that can be considered on par with Celtic Frost for the developement of music. Formed by friends Robert Arthur Mould (vocals/guitar) and Grant Vernon Hart (drums), with bassist Gregory James Norton coming later, the band started playing gigs in 1979 and became acquainted with Greg Ginn's SST Records (of Black Flag fame), staying with the label for three more albums.

Promoted as a concept album about a boy running from family life and discovering an even worse outside world and a GODDAMN 70 minutes mammoth with four vinyl sides, 1984's Zen Arcade is considered the band's magnum opus. Production sounds a bit old for its time, with obsolete sound engineering, indiscernible, saturated peaks shrilling, roaring guitar distortion more suited to Black Metal than Punk Rock, shrieking vocals that barely hold a melody and plenty of songwriting variety. Almost all tracks were allegedly recorded in one take, and the whole album was mixed and mastered in barely four days.

Classics from the album include opener "Something I Learned Today" (Asus2 chording that really nods to 90's Post-Rock), "Chartered Trips" (great lyrics about the illusion of departing for greener pastures) and a two-chord square mid-tempo anticipating future Nirvana ("What's Going On"). Other non-classics include "Broken Home, Broken Heart", "Indecision Time", "Pride" (some of the last remnants of the band's past hardcore sound), the moody acoustic strumming ("Never Talking to You Again"), Indian raga parody ("Hare Kṛṣṇa"), a mournful waltz ("Standing by the Sea") and a jovial tale of misantrophy ("Newest Industry"). Final 14-minutes mammoth "Reoccurring Dreams" is essentially an instrumental nod to 70's Krautrock with two patterns repeated over and over and improvised guitar leads ("Dreams Reoccurring" is a snippet with reverse recording).

The classics are good, if not having hints of genius, but most of the lesser cuts are too devoted to hardcore thrashing to hold any relevance.

Highlights: "Something I Learned Today", "Chartered Trips", "What's Going On", "Pink Turns to Blue", "Newest Industry".

An alleged concept over global, political espionage and dictatorship, 2006's Panopticon contains more morunful C#-minor balladry ("So Did We"), major-key riffing ("Backlit"), increased use of droning clean guitars and tuneless barbaric chanting and repetitive tracks based on 1 or 2 patterns at max ("In Fiction", "Altered Course"). With the exception of the total lack of tritons, the band was starting to release the same album over and over.

Highlights: "So Did We", "Altered Course", "Grinning Mouths".

An alleged concept about a man making love with a woman, getting disappointed because of her incestuous relationship with her brother and committing suicide by drowning, 2002's Oceanic sounds just as minimal as their debut, but less sledgehammer-like and with more mournful pentatonic riffing ("The Beginning of the End", "Hym"), climatic Ambient codas ("Weight") and some major-key stuff ("From Sinking"). With none of the cerebral tempo changes and environmentalist elitism of their followers (The Ocean Collective), the album actually sounds "accessible", despite its focus on monolith breakdowns.

Highlights: "The Beginning and the End", "Weight", "From Sinking".

Colombia's Iron Spell are a clone of Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Symphony X and King Diamond/Mercyful Fate From the Grave: conventional songwriting, but the production (ultra-trebly, bit-crushed hats, distant, shoddy guitars and droning digital bass) sounds like a total parody of the band's focus on classic-metal.

Ritualmord is a side project of Kim Carl Martin Carlsson of Hypothermia and Lifelover, Rickard Öström, allegedly a member of Ritualmord (until 2015) and Lifelover, for a period, and Belgian solo weirdo Déhà/Olmo Lipani: their 2025 debut, This Is Not Lifelover, contains alleged "songs that did not fit Lifelover", consisting of Joy Division/The Cure-like distant balladry ("Stonerpop") cozy guitars akin to Ofdrykkja and minimal Ambient ("Totalitär Tomhet"). When coupled with the album cover and the title, you can't help but shake the feeling this is all a bloody, unfunny joke... in pure Depressive Black Metal style.