Every time I’m ready to signal the death knell for deathcore, along comes a release that kinda gets me excited about the genre again, whether it’s a veteran band like Despised Icon coming back from the dead or a newcomer like Anime Terror. Right now it happens to be the Unique Leader duo of Mental Cruelty‘s A Hill to Die Upon and the third banger of an album from the Uks Osiah, Loss.

The UK has a surprisingly strong slam/deathcore/downtempo scene headed by the likes of Ingested, B;acl Tongue, Infant Annihilator, Bound In Fear and such, but with Loss, I think Osiah has elbowed their way into the conversation as one of the UK’s best deathcore bands.

I first heard the band a few years ago with the 2013 single, “Perennial Agony” (the Blazing Saddles sample still gets me every time), so I purchased the subsequent albums, but they never really sunk in, being just solid deathcore. However, with Loss, everything has been cranked up; the production (from the band’s own Andy Mallaby), the cover art, the songwriting, the delivery, and of course, the breakdowns. All of it magnified and better than any of the prior albums.

After the intro “Realm of Misery”, you get 12 more songs and 47 minutes of no-nonsense, straight for the throat, modern, death metal-tinged deathcore with all the expected tropes. They don’t overthink it or litter it with needless fluff or even keyboards (which I don’t mind, I love bands like Lorna Shore, Mental Cruelty and Shadow of Intent), just a pure beatdown, with some really strong breakdowns.

Early standouts include “Paracusia”, “Queen of Sorrow” “Temporal Punishment” and the title track. The middle and back end of the album has the absolute banger “War Within Our Walls”, “The Ominous Mind”, “Echoes” and “Already Lived. In fact, the whole album is pretty darn strong and hits hard from start to finish, especially if you are a fan of deathcore and its predictable paradigms.

[Visit the band's website]

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