ALBUM REVIEW: You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To – Knocked Loose

Tempting though it is to commit to the good old ‘needs no introduction’ thing, let’s just gush for a moment shall we? KNOCKED LOOSE have become the most exciting band in heavy music and they’ve done it without resorting to any of the usual means like watering down their sound or leaning into about 327 gimmicks – not that we’re naming names or anything. Their new album You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is definitely the most anticipated record that will fall into the Distorted Sound remit this year and even then it comes with way more eyes on it than that what with all the TikTok and Coachella and BILLIE EILISH love they’ve picked up over the last few years.

And so it remains particularly wonderful – if entirely unsurprising – that the band have refused to compromise in the slightest here. Yes, Grammy-nominated producer Drew “WZRD BLD” Fulk does normally work with more accessible metalcore bands; yes, POPPY and Chris Motionless of MOTIONLESS IN WHITE are more mainstream-adjacent guests than the likes of Keith Buckley and Emma Boster who appeared on the last one; and yes, there is something a little more catchy about recent singles like Suffocate and especially the gigantic Don’t Reach For Me; but this is still all KNOCKED LOOSE, as vicious and visceral and violent as one could ever want them to be, just with everything else dialled up too.

That the band wrote 40 songs and narrowed them down to ten should say a lot for the tight and formidable focus of this record. There is respite along the way – the occasional break or sample or menacing soundscape, and naturally some more dynamic tracks like Take Me Home and closer Sit & Mourn – as indeed is needed on an album like this, but for the most part You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To concerns itself with utter annihilation, with breakdowns that make your eyes bulge and riffs that make your stomach churn and of course the desperate piercing screech of vocalist Bryan Garris that has always done so much to shape the band’s sonic identity. It’s all there right where you’d want it, if anything with the production of the aforementioned Fulk scaling things up to more gargantuan proportions than ever.

As obvious as this has been of KNOCKED LOOSE for a while now, it really is a special band that can seize the listener’s attention as forcefully as they do from the moment opener Thirst blasts to life and then remain just as arresting all the way until Sit & Mourn delivers its final crushing blows some 27 minutes later. The dynamics help with this as you’d expect, but ultimately the band always find a way of ratcheting up the intensity even when it seems far beyond the bounds of reason to do so. Many will already recognise the hulking reggaeton rhythm of Suffocate or the too-many-breakdowns-to-count of Don’t Reach For Me as prime examples of this, though another is The Calm That Keeps You Awake, its additional percussion and colossal closing riff reaching levels of earth-shaking typically reserved for the GOJIRAs and SEPULTURAs of the world.

It is clear too that neither POPPY nor Motionless have been brought in for their relative radio-friendliness, each instead bringing their own savagery to tracks flecked with industrial influences, while Moss Covers All’s 46-second runtime about halfway through the tracklist may suggest an interlude at first but is actually a rager in its own right – all CONVERGE-esque violence and ignorant breakdowns with a little creeping break in the middle. But we could be here all day on particulars; the truth is each and every one of these tracks has been honed to its sharpest point. You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To goes full Iowa in its complete disregard for what a band with this much hype is supposed to do in this situation; it meets even the most astronomical expectations to which it arrives and ultimately stands as further irrefutable proof of a truly generational talent.

Rating: 9/10

You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is set for release on May 10th via Pure Noise Records.

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