Stunning debut from highly talented Washington sextet, and one of the best metal albums you'll hear all year.

Considering how many bands out there these days seem to love indulging in progressively-influenced metal with blazing musicianship and amazing technical chops, but are ultimately able only provide an experience of severe fretboard-wankery, it’s worth making a very simple point: all the talent in the world doesn’t mean you can write decent songs. Thank God for Periphery, then. Here’s an insanely talented group of musicians who are able to combine stunning technical skill, punishing riffs and soaring melodic sensibilities into not only a stunning debut album, but one of the best metal records you’ll hear all year.

What sets Periphery apart from so many bands employing a similar style is the distinct ability to write a decent tune, and a wide variety of them too. Openers Insomnia and The Walk are pounding bursts of fast technical metal, Jetpacks Was Yes! and Ow My Feelings are slower, restrained numbers showcasing the bands incredible knack for writing moving melodies and you’ll find some mind-meltingly intricate extreme metal behemoths in the shape of Zyglrox and Buttersnips. Periphery don’t seem comfortable offering the same stale ten songs in the same tuning and in the same structure like so many metal bands these days, and the range in their songwriting is something to applaud.

As Periphery continues, you can’t help but be struck by just how high the quality of this album is. Vocalist Spencer Sotelo has a stunning clean vocal range and a rasping roar, marking himself out as one of the greatest voices in metal today right off the bat. A trio of guitarists, led by band producer Misha Mansoor all interweave to create a stunning wall of sound that marks the band out even further. Mansoor’s production, helped by honing his recording skills whilst the band grew over the last 5 years is simply stunning; a gigantic but clear sound if ever there was one. Experimental electronic flourishes end most of the album’s songs before leading into the next, giving the whole record a sense of flow before Racecar shows up; an amazing 15 minute prog metal epic ends the album with some stunning grooves and an epic, genuinely moving melodic conclusion. The only fault to be found here is that All New Materials isn’t quite up to scratch with the rest of the songs around it, but when you’ve got a dirty, deep riff the size of Russia in Icarus Lives!, who cares?

So many other bands with this level of talent and thinking fall into the desperate trap of trying to write ten songs in one, offering barely twenty seconds of sustained structure before gallivanting off to the next breakdown, but Periphery have the intelligence and the skill to offer exciting, evolving and impressive songwriting without disappearing up their own backsides in fits of over indulgence. Periphery have created an intelligent, intense and utterly absorbing record here, and if we had our way, every metalhead in the world would have a copy of this album, along with every record Periphery will ever do. Here’s to the future, because the future sounds bloody awesome.

Iwan Lehnert