ALBUM REVIEW: Boundless – With Honor
The 00s will probably always be remembered as hardcore’s more melodic era – well, as long as that’s the sort of thing you spend your free time thinking about that is. HAVE HEART essentially perfected it in 2008 with Songs To Scream At The Sun, but the entire decade is littered with fantastic releases from the likes of AMERICAN NIGHTMARE, COMEBACK KID, BANE, VERSE, THE HOPE CONSPIRACY and many others who helped define a sound that has begun to make a real comeback in recent years. Among them also were Connecticut straight edge crew WITH HONOR, their 2004 debut full-length Heart Means Everything another seminal release from the era, and its 2005 follow-up This Is Our Revenge having stood as the band’s final studio effort for the past 18 years.
That changes this Friday though with the release of their third full-length Boundless, the five-piece having been galvanised by their 2021 reunion at Furnace Fest after years of minimal activity. It is always hard to avoid talk of bands ‘picking up where they left off’ with comeback records like this, but to be clear from the start, that really is the case here. For better and perhaps sometimes for worse, Boundless definitely sounds like it could’ve come out just a couple of years after This Is Our Revenge rather than the nearly two decades that it actually took to come to fruition.
To take that positively, it means that WITH HONOR have no trouble delivering on the high-energy motivational style they had nailed all those years ago. Lead single My Anchor kicks things off urgent and melodic, with octave guitar parts, the occasional harder riff, and the impassioned bark of vocalist Todd Mackey forming the building blocks of the first of 12 songs that are all quite like it. Open Hands is another single and another highlight on the record, here with Mackey bordering on full singing as lines like “I’m waking up today like I will never be the same” speak to the track’s themes of embracing the new self. He makes these forays into cleaner vocals a few times on the record, including not least in Both/And a couple of tracks further along, although that one actually stands out far more for the furious shout-along of its second half.
On the other hand though, as much as it is impressive that WITH HONOR don’t seem to have missed a beat since they were last making music, they also haven’t really evolved from that point either. Maybe that’s to be expected – after all, it’s not like they’ve been tinkering away on this for years or playing loads of shows or anything else that might usually provoke growth – but it does mean that Boundless starts to slip into a bit of a formula as it goes on. It’s not the end of the world as the record is only 32 minutes long, but aside perhaps from the incendiary guest feature of Kat Lanzillo of FAIM on tenth track Rank & File and the genuinely great climactic closer Grown Up & Gone, it does feel like the second half of the album runs the risk of washing over the listener a little.
But that’s a nitpick; WITH HONOR have a powerful and motivational style, and as a lyricist Mackey is really great at writing simple but memorable lines like “I have everything I need in me” and “Now I know what I want / It’s everything that I’ve got” that make Boundless ultimately quite an inspiring and uplifting experience. For that reason alone it’s great to have WITH HONOR back, and while they may not have done much to change the game here, they have at the very least demonstrated that they can still play it just as well as they could back in the day.
Rating: 7/10
Boundless is set for release on September 8th via Pure Noise Records.
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