Hymns in Dissonance, indeed: “No holds barred; there is nothing nice about HID, from the riffs to the lyrics to the overall vibe of the album,” states guitarist Alex Wade. “We attempted to write our heaviest album to date. We wanted to put out something that was shockingly menacing and brutal.”

“The album follows the story of a cultist who is gathering worthy people to join his cult,” Wade furthers, “and there are moments in the storyline where the cult followers are singing an evil hymn to open a portal for the head cultist to enter.” The band’s dynamic, brutal musicality serves as a soundtrack to the compelling lyrical story that vocalist Phil Bozeman vividly imagines.

“Hymns in Dissonance is a mockery of the true nature of what hymns are,” Bozeman explains. “Hymns are melodious and harmonious. Dissonance is the opposite of melody and harmony. Dissonance represents evil. The tracks on the record are the hymns, which represent the seven deadly sins, beginning from Track 3 to Track 10. Tracks one and two are the introduction.”

The lineup’s timely and terrifying vision was first unveiled in Fall 2024 with the single “A Visceral Retch” inciting frenzied fans to call the song “a version of Whitechapel we have never heard before. Can’t explain how absolutely goddamn brutal this song is. This is a total dream come true.” The title track is the LP’s second single.

Whitechapel, who formed in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2006, has seen the core lineup—vocalist Phill Bozeman; guitarists Ben Savage, Zach Householder and Alex Wade; bassist Gabe Crisp—intact since 2007, with the exception of the drummer Brandon Zackey, who has been playing with the band since 2022. While Hymns in Dissonance follows 2021’s Kin chronologically, the new album is actually somewhat of a sequel to This is Exile thematically, the three-word title Hymns in Dissonance representing that correlation.

Whitechapel started writing for the new album at Householder’s studio in June of 2023, following the band’s headlining tour for The Valley. Whitechapel stuck to a strict weekday schedule, the structure allowing for maximum creativity and minimum burnout. Householder produced Hymns in Dissonance, which allowed the musicians to seamlessly switch gears from preproduction to recording the full album without skipping a beat. The guitarist shadowed producer Mark Lewis a lot over the last five Whitechapel albums and bringing that influence inside the band is a “full circle moment for Householder and Whitechapel. “It’s cool that we can be self-sufficient and produce a record of this magnitude ourselves; not a lot of bands can say that.”

Every detail on HID matters. “With song sequencing we like to try to make our albums as dynamic as possible,” Wade says. “We like to give the records a roller-coaster effect toggling the energy of the tracks up and down to keep the listener interested.” It was likewise critical that the album art tied into the music in a visceral, provocative way, or has Bozeman put it, “something simple but unsettling with a very classic feel. But not over the top with too many things to look at.” Guitarist Savage mocked up ideas for an eerie mask that would represent the cult leader in the album’s story. Whitechapel chose artist Rob Borbas, the European tattoo artist known as “Grind Design,” to create the cover. “He specializes in dark/cryptic tattoos, and we felt he would be able to take Savage’s idea with the mask and bring it to life,” Whitechapel explains. “He certainly met our expectations with a dark, evil, ominous piece that makes you question ‘what is that?’ when you look at it. We wanted the cover to be mysterious until you know more about the story of the album and how the cover applies to it.” Hymns in Dissonance sees the band reinventing themselves, going darker, deeper and heavier. While the songs all stand powerfully on their own, the throughline Bozeman says that “more than likely there will be a tour where we play the album from front to back.”

Longtime fans will detect hints of the past within the brutality. To wit: the riff-tastic “Hate Cult Ritual” is the only song on the album with Drop A tuning, the tuning the first three Whitechapel albums used. Additionally, the Hymns in Dissonance chapter in Bozeman’s life finds the frontman living through his “past times,” or as he states, “the music that brought me here. Brutal, dark, aggressive, heavy music. Death metal, black metal, speed metal, etc. I truly believe that your roots call you back at some point in your life and this is that point in my life.”

Vocally, the recording process allowed Bozeman to achieve all his goals. “Recording was on our time, so if I wasn’t feeling it on a certain day, then I’d just stop, reset and go again the following day. I honed in more on the progression of the screaming vocals that I’m known for,” the singer says. “I really reworked my high vocals and tried some new different types of tones with my voice. Basically, a new-age feel to a classic sound.”

At this stage in the game, the name Whitechapel commands the ultimate respect. Already sitting on one of the most enviable catalogs in contemporary metal, in 2019 they dropped The Valley, highlighting a confident evolution in their sound and standing as a true landmark release that sets a new standard for the genre.  With Bozeman exploring childhood trauma on 2019’s The Valley, it was their darkest release to-date. But with its 2021 successor, Kin, the story was darker still.

With those chapters of Bozeman’s life exorcised lyrically, Hymns in Dissonance mines a darkness that’s not lyrically personal. And, says Wade, “I don’t think HID follows Kin musically at all. If anything, it’s the polar opposite. For this album it was fun to be able to just let loose and write ignorantly heavy music again. This album stands on its own,” Wade concludes. “Phil was able to create a fresh story to write about, which, in turn, helped us write music with a fresher sound.”

Legacy metal band Chelsea Grin brings decades of experience to the metal scene. Formed in 2007, the group has put out multiple full length albums and toured the world nonstop since their inception. Hailing from Salt Lake City, Utah, Chelsea Grin helped pioneer the sub genre Deathcore and have managed to stay relevant in the scene for decades. Selling out venues around the world, their music speaks to their fans that have stayed loyal to them throughout the years.

No matter how different we may seem on the outside, the same primal needs unite all of us. Among the essentials, we require connection to one another. The world could be teetering on the brink of extinction (and it may very well be right now!), and people would still find ways to unify…

Since the turn of the century, The Acacia Strain have rallied audiences around an ever-evolving and earthquaking hybrid of existential metal, cosmic hardcore, airy doom, and snow-covered sludge. The quintet—Vincent Bennett [vocals], Devin “Big Slime” Shidaker [guitar], Griffin Landa [bass], Mike Mulholland [guitar], and Matt Guglielmo [drums]—beckon connection by asking big questions and extending a hand through the chaos and across the pit. Once again, they incite catharsis in its purest form on their thirteenth full-length offering, You Are Safe From God Here [Rise Records].

“Whether you’re 15-years-old or 50-years-old, you need something to hold onto, a place to go, and somebody to understand you, even if it’s just a guy screaming at you through a speaker,” smiles Vincent. “Listening to music is a way to get everything off your chest. It’s extremely hard to be a human being, and I don’t want anybody to feel alone.”

The collective have continued to remind listeners of this truth, while churning out some of the downright heaviest riffs, grooves, and screams on the planet. Along the way, they’ve delivered staple LPs such as Wormwood [2010], Coma Witch [2014], Gravebloom [2017], It Comes In Waves [2019], Slow Decay [2020], and the double-salvo of full-length records Step Into The Light and Failure Will Follow—hailed by Revolver as “Two of 2023’s heaviest albums.” Beyond praise from Brooklyn Vegan, Decibel, and DORK, New Noise bestowed a perfect score of “5-out-of-5 stars” upon Failure Will Follow and christened it “a work of art that shows what metal bands can do and what more should start doing.” Moreover, they’ve collaborated with everyone from Courtney LaPlante of Spiritbox to Aaron Herd of Jesus Piece. Along the way, they’ve also collected nearly 100 million total streams, which is rare if not unheard of for an outfit this uncompromising. Simultaneously, the group have earned a reputation as a live force of nature, packing theaters on headline runs and even launching their own New England Sadness & Failure Festival in 2025 at the Worcester Palladium with a cohort of heavy-hitters a la On Broken Wings, Missing Link, Age of Apocalypse, and more.

The musicians assembled what would become You Are Safe From God Here alongside trusted collaborator and producer Randy LeBoeuf. Once again, they expanded their sonic and thematic palette, pushing the envelope in the process.

“We’ve explored ‘The End of the World’ scenario and watched it in countless movies, books, and albums, so we went in another direction,” reveals Vincent.  “What happens thousands of years after everything has ended, or millions of years later on other planets and in different realities? What if there was something before earth that needed to be put in its place, but it escaped? What if the Biblical God, Muslim God, Hindu God, and every God was the same omnipresent being who got out of control and we had to do whatever we could to stay from it? I simply call it the ‘depressive dark low fantasy era of The Acacia Strain’,” he laughs.

A guttural groan of feedback grumbles at the onset of the single “A CALL BEYOND,” slipping down a slope of punchy drums and incisive riffing. Vincent warns, “If you get to heaven and you don’t find me there, you are in hell.” His screams teeter on top of a trudging groove, giving way to a thrashy break punctuated by a confession, “I lost control…Six feet further from God. Six feet closer to Hell.”

“The record has a dual meaning,” he notes. “In terms of the word ‘God’, I’m also thinking of things that rule your mind like depression, anxiety, or a job you hate. You’re trying to find a place away from all of that. ‘A CALL BEYOND’ points this out and embraces the fact you need to do something. It’s simply about being fucking depressed and trying to come to terms with it.”

An ominous bassline wobbles beneath growls on the opener “eucharist i: BURNT OFFERING,” and the frontman assures, “You are safe from God here.” The track lunges forward in a breakneck flurry of guitar, drums, bass, and violent vocal transmissions. “We knew it had to be the first track,” he reveals. “One day, I looked up at the sky. The sun was peeking through the clouds with this ray. The cloud actually looked cracked. I took a picture, posted it on Instagram, and I used the words, ‘You are safe from God here’.”

Elsewhere, “WORLD GONE COLD” layers Vincent’s venomous musings over a sparse soundscape. You can practically hear his teeth clench as he sighs, “The older I get, the less I want to be around.”

“It’s personal to me, because it’s very real,” he admits. “I never wear my heart on my sleeve lyrically, but I did here.”

Then, there’s the 13 minute-plus finale “eucharist ii: BLOOD LOSS.” It unfolds as the most epic exorcism in their catalog thus far, slithering through echoes of clean guitar, ethereal harmonies, and distorted convulsions twisted like a knife.

“We were writing ‘eucharist ii’ and realized it used similar riffs as ‘eucharist i’, but slower,” he goes on. “It’s definitely an extension of the first part. ‘eucharist i’ is angry and aggressive. ‘eucharist ii’ is probably the saddest thing I’ve ever done in my life; it’s the end of everything.”

Even if the world all goes to shit, The Acacia Strain’s music will be there for you.

“I have to do this, because I’ve been doing it since I was 19,” he leaves off. “I don’t know how to do anything else. It’s hard to think of The Acacia Strain ever ending, because I need it. It’s become ingrained in us, and it’s most of my life. I’ve been in this band longer than I haven’t. So, it’s humbling to hear when people rely on us for music and shows.”

Forged in the blazing dominion of Florida, Netherwalker aims to bring mythical symphonies and storytelling to the metal world. Formed in 2021, the band has since found success online with singles such as Tavern, Battle of Tredem, and Thine King Weeps for Mercy. With the goal of playing live, guitarist and founder Grayson Yearty needed a full lineup to complete the band, bringing on vocalist Alex Calver and drummer Mauricio Cortez Bowles in 2024.

Drawing influence from bands such as Infant Annihilator, Necrophagist and Dark Funeral, Netherwalker forges a sound that unites deathcore with medieval fantasy. Their recently released debut album, Odyssey of Respair (2025), tells the tale of three courageous knights bound by fate, embarking on a quest to reclaim their fallen kingdom.