Album review: Dying Wish – Flesh Stays Together

Previously, Dying Wish drew strength from fighting the good fight in the face of a world gone to shit. That seems to have changed on album three. Doubtless in reality, Emma Boster and her bandmates will continue to campaign against the rightward sociopolitical lurch in the United States and beyond. But Flesh Stays Together is drawn from emotions churning potently beneath the surface: hopelessness, mourning, dread for what’s down the line.

“There’s an underlying theme that God has abandoned us,” Emma says of the record’s bleak basis. “We wanted it to feel hopeless. Like, we’re so fucked. If God is cruel, we’re worse.”

It’s a sentiment borne out spectacularly in the bleak build, gnashing fury and almost despondent payoff to album opener I Don’t Belong Anywhere. It ebbs and flows through the ethereal and extremist peaks and troughs of A Curse Upon Iron. It’s even in the album’s frequent forays into clear softer sounds and clean singing: a relatively ‘listenable’ track like I’ll Know You’re Not Around packing deeply troubling lyrics amongst the rumbling bludgeon and beauty, declaring, ‘A life in agony is worse than death / I no longer care what comes next.’

Rather than being lost in rivers of despair, though, Dying Wish have channeled them into their most resonant release to date. Nothing Like You may draw on (self-)loathing and doubt but it pours those feelings into hypnotically glassy sounds. The apoplectic Surrender Everything refuses to go down without due carnage. Moments I Regret is poignantly relatable, rampaging from ruefulness to rage, then Empty The Chamber goes utterly postal.

Intriguingly, different circumstances could have seen Portland’s gnarliest being labelled ‘sell-outs’ for the stylistic evolutions on Flesh Stays Together: trend-chasing traitors to their 2000s metalcore forbears. So intense – so justified – are the emotions at play here, however, that nothing feels dialled back. Even as the album closes with the spectacularly cinematic soundscape of Heaven Departs (very latter-day Spiritbox) opening out into an almost entirely clean-sung title-track, their vice-grip around listeners’ hearts only tightens.

It’s a compelling squeeze to find yourself caught up in, a stark coming of age for metalcore pacesetters whose potential now seems limitless.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Knocked Loose, Counterparts, Spiritbox

Flesh Stays Together is out now via SharpTone