EP REVIEW: You’ll Know It Was Me – Church Tongue

February 14, 2025 Sammy Andrews

Indianapolis’ CHURCH TONGUE are reintroducing themselves to the metalcore world on You’ll Know It Was Me, and do so with pummelling precision. Exploring love in its varying facets, You’ll Know It Was Me is as emotionally striking as it is sonically intense, ensuring a compelling and commanding experience of just what they are capable of.

Opening track Heart Of Darkness is gnarly straight out of the gates. Pummelling drums and assaulting vocals hit immediately, with a gritty breakdown making it known from the start of the EP that CHURCH TONGUE are not messing around. This momentum carries onto One Hand Wrapped Around The Sun, with its entrancing opening guitar riff pulling the track into a blitz of fury.

Establishing their own ground as compellingly brutal, CHURCH TONGUE also invite titans of hardcore and metal to collaborate on You’ll Know It Was Me. The first of which comes from Colin Young (GOD’S HATE and TWITCHING TONGUES) on When It Betrays. Writing his own lines, Colin offers lyrical deftness and pulverising vocals that hit at the heart of the track and push its emotional resonance. The track is an intense and visceral reflection on lead singer Mike Sugars’ choice of sobriety, piercing at the core of self-love amongst the EP’s thematic heart. Striking harmonies pull out of the depths of the track and find CHURCH TONGUE pushing their sound to new dimensions.

The Fury Of Love builds out of the repeated, enchanting guitar riff that opens into a blaze of drums and explosive riffs. A darker turn on the EP, The Fury Of Love builds to an atmospheric crescendo, in which INITIATE’s Crystal Pak lends caustic screams and adds another ferocious height to the EP. From this height, comes the fastest track on the EP Bury Me (One Thousand Times) which offers CHURCH TONGUE space to strike their own forceful tenacity amongst the EP’s collaborations.

Closing the EP, the title track offers a haunting love song. In the twisting darkness of the tracks melodic guitars, CHURCH TONGUE explore the afterlife, and how vocalist Mike Sugars would love his wife through the afterlife should he die first. This compellingly ghostly sentiment is wonderfully met with the distinct and scrawling vocals of DEAFHEAVEN’s George Clarke. As you are pulled into this world, CHURCH TONGUE propel you in further with violent drums, gritty basslines and gnarly riffs that explode out into cataclysmic heights, rounding off the EP’s focus on love with a haunting clarity.

On You’ll Know It Was Me, CHURCH TONGUE reintroduce themselves and present themselves with striking ambition and tenacity. Standing amongst titans of metal and hardcore on You’ll Know It Was Me, CHURCH TONGUE are able to not only hold their own, but to create heightened experiences with their music in this ambitious tenacity. They are not ones to overlook, and You’ll Know It Was Me ensures that their entrancing style and pulverising riffs will not go unnoticed.

Rating: 8/10