Nashville, Tennessee, might not be you first thought when thinking quality metalcore, well it’s time to think again, because bruisers Chamber are back with their new album, A Love To Kill For. The band’s relative isolation has helped them shape a sound all their very own, and in an age where we’ve become desensitised to heavy music, this quintet are finding further extremities to explore. So put on a helmet, pop in a gum shield, and protect your neck, because Chamber are here to deliver an abject lesson in brutality.
Opening punch is the eponymous ‘Chamber’, a cut that perfectly encapsulates the band’s modus operandi. There’s no time for fancy introductions or preliminary niceties, there’s just a musical landslide which covers the listener with sonic debris. It says all it has to in 70 succinct seconds, and its brevity is also its strength; everything here is honed into a tightly focused laser beam, and you get the feeling that Chamber have crammed more into this one song than most bands have packed into an entire career. Such is its raw, visceral power that you wonder how it could be followed, and the answer is with ‘Retribution’, a track that, like a fine malt whiskey, has been distilled of any impurities until all that is left is the most rumbustious form of metalcore. That’s indicative of this whole album, with only two tracks breaking the three-minute mark, there’s absolutely no filler here, and each track takes the most direct line to what the f*ck it’s all about.
Chamber have the type of sound that reminds me of early Glassjaw (or even Sons Of Abraham), this is a kind of controlled chaos with each song perched precariously on a precipice, and it is to Chamber’s collective credit that they keep it held in such a position throughout the whole album. Stitched together with epilepsy-inducing guitar lines and quickstep drum rhythms, A Love To Kill For is topped with Jacob Lilley’s caustic vocals, and the result is a full-on sonic assault. The album’s theme is one of becoming stagnant, lost in a pool of narcissism or addiction, and as befits such weighty topics, the music found on A Love To Kill For is just as heavy. There are gnarly techy parts rubbing shoulders with math-metal sections (that’s right, math-metal) whilst offering plenty of opportunities to cut loose in the pit, meaning that cuts such as ‘At My Hands’ and ‘Cyanide Embrace’ are going to cause all sorts of mayhem when they’re taken out on the road.
A Love To Kill For finds the unstoppable juggernaut this is Chamber going from strength to strength.
- A Love To Kill For is released via Pure Noise Records on 14th July 2023.
Track List:
- Chamber
- Retribution
- At My Hands
- Tremble
- To Die In The Grip Of Poison
- One Final Sacrifice
- We Followed You To The Bitter
- Our Beauty Decayed, Nothing Was Left
- Devoured
- When Deliverance Comes
- Mirror
- Cyanide Embrace
- A Love To Kill For
- Hopeless Portrait
