Album review: Lorna Shore – I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me

Superstardom has been beckoning Lorna Shore for years. All it took was striking the perfect balance. Stumbling onto frontman Will Ramos after a decade of spinning their wheels, not only had the New Jersey mainstays unearthed the ideal vocalist for their maximalist brand of symphonic deathcore, they’d joined forces with a personality capable of hauling them from metal’s nerdy outer reaches to the heights of the heavy mainstream. Likewise, motormouthed Will gained a musical foundation so unapologetically OTT that he needed to hold nothing back. Viral 2021 breakout To The Hellfire lit the fuse. 2022’s Pain Remains cemented a blistering rep. Three years on, they’re fully ready to claim the throne.

In the truest sense, I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me feels like a culmination. Simply getting gnarlier was never really an option for such renowned purveyors of shrieking pig squeals and guttural belching. Any hint of conventional clean-sung ‘listenability’ was anathema. Instead, they’ve set about fine-tuning and supercharging, ramping up the bloodcurdling theatricality and mining deeper and deeper from the inky darkness within.

Seven-minute opener Prison Of Flesh – the lyrics to which offered up that menacing album title – lays out the stall spectacularly: 75 seconds of pulsating percussion eventually slingshotting onto a rollercoaster ride full of gnashing vocals, knotty guitar solos and Wagnerian operatic flourishes.

Oblivion is even bigger and bolder, taking the listener on a nightmarish post-apocalyptic odyssey through scorched cityscapes into the very heart of darkness. Ironically, In Darkness itself offers the first shards of light with choral vocals and soaring six-strings, before Unbreakable launches its bloodthirsty, adrenaline-spiking assault, sort of like latter-day Parkway Drive if someone peeled off all their skin.

And so it goes. Keeping up that intensity for 10 tracks and well over an hour, absolutely no-one will be left feeling short-changed. From the relative fragility of Glenwood to Lionheart’s chest-beating machismo, the sprawling, shapeshifting Death Can take Me to zero-bullshit banger War Machine, there’s no lack of invention or exploration.

If there’s an obvious criticism it’s that the relentless more-is-more mentality could be fatiguing even for hardcore fans if they’re not in a sufficiently ravenous frame of mind. But by the time Will and the boys cast off into near-10-minute closer Forevermore any such complaints will be lost in its churning sea of sound and fury, ripped up in the undertow and spat out by a spectacular closing swell.

Pummelling proof that Lorna Shore deserve every heavy honour headed their way.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Whitechapel, Thy Art Is Murder, Fit For An Autopsy

I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me is released September 12 via Century Media.

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