ALBUM REVIEW: My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest – Your Spirit Dies
It’s always nice when a band proves you right. Back in December 2022 this writer penned a review of YOUR SPIRIT DIES’ killer sophomore EP Our Saints Drown In Ash which posited that the South Carolina metalcore outfit’s sound “may take them a long way on nostalgia alone but they clearly don’t plan on stopping there”. Now, almost two-and-a-half years later, their debut full-length confirms exactly that: the gargantuan, biblically-titled My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest builds on the foundations of the band’s obvious taste for classic metalcore while also proving more ambitious, more technically accomplished, and ultimately just straight-up bigger as is fitting of the step up to a longer format.
If YOUR SPIRIT DIES’ previous efforts evoked most of all a time when metalcore was becoming a bankable and codified genre – somewhere around the early 00s essentially – My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest fittingly moves the throwback a few years further on to the days when the genre was at the height of its powers – when the NWOAHM was in full effect and KILLSWITCH and co. were completely unfuckwithable and literally everyone seemed to have realised just how good Slaughter Of The Soul really is. Importantly, and as before, it’s not void of identity either, with the band dialling in a diverse set of influences from the heft of GODFLESH to the ferocity of NAPALM DEATH to the atmosphere of 70s giallo films and wrapping it all up in a beefy mix from returning producer Greg Thomas (END, MISERY SIGNALS) to move things clearly enough into their own lane.
As for the tracks themselves, you can confidently file all 12 under bangers. The likes of A Rose For Every Stone, Unjust God and Night Pierces My Bones flex the melodic muscles the band started to develop on Our Saints Drown In Ash, with soaring clean vocal choruses – the latter’s courtesy of THE CALLOUS DAOBOYS’ ever-magnetic Carson Pace – elevating all three to stand among the record’s most immediately memorable efforts. Others – in fact all of them really – reach similarly towering stature via the size and power of their riff and grooves, with tracks like Monochrome, Shrouded In Silence and the aforementioned Night Pierces My Bones doling out the kind of mind-bending, chug-heavy bludgeonings that could give any of GOJIRA, LAMB OF GOD or the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a run for their money in terms of destruction wrought.
Well, hopefully a bit of hyperbole never hurt anyone. The point is My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest is absolutely massive and definitely an album that should cement YOUR SPIRIT DIES’ place among the vanguard of a whole host of bands who are out there making metalcore mean what it was meant to again. That these guys work as well with Dan Weyandt of ZAO as they do with Blaythe Steuer of NO CURE – on Serpentine and A Snow In Summer respectively – is particularly telling: evidence of a band who could have walked comfortably among the titans of the genre about 20 years ago, but whose sound also feels fresh and current and crushing enough to compete with just about any metalcore record you’ll hear in the present day.
Rating: 8/10
My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest is set for release on May 2nd via MNRK Heavy.
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