Fit For A King’s ‘Dark Skies’ Might Be The Band At Their Most Ambitious & Confident Yet

There are few better candidates than Fit For A King to be considered at the front of the straight-up heavy modern metalcore pack. They ensure via their new record Dark Skies, out 9/14 via Solid State Records, that the uniquely styled personal and immensely heavy music they play will go charging into the future.

Musically, the album sounds like Fit For A King at their most ambitious and confident. There’s a depth and “hugeness” to the sound that gives the album an epic feel and places it among their best work (not to definitively suggest that anything they’ve put out falls below par). They sound experimental with their approach to framing the heaviness at work, but importantly, they never lose any of their metaphorical punch. There’s a danger, at times, of heavy bands taking their work in an ambitiously experimental direction that they lose some of their intensity, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. Fit For A King completely averts that danger on their new record, although they do include very effective, emotionally driven (and somewhat brief) forays into clean singing and slowed down music.

Their music packs repeated blasts of energy for the listener, but musically, it’s personable. In other words, the weight of their music doesn’t conceal the core of the music itself — which isn’t a new feature of Fit For A King’s work, but remains important anyway. Having a heavy metalcore song that’s catchy works — fans of the band are going to be holding onto the tracks from Dark Skies for a long time to come. That outcome is easily imagined just from how dynamic the band sounds here.

On that personal level, Fit For A King once again delivers a work that has an emotional punch in addition to the aforementioned physical one via Dark Skies. They’ve married intense emotion that normally rages on the inside with blistering music that’s very much raging on the outside, and in so doing, taken both aspects to new heights. In short, it’s extremely difficult to come away from this record not feeling something. Just feeling something is hardly the entire point of the record, but it portrays a drive from the band — and delivers it to the listener — that’s inescapable.

5/5 Stars

Check out the single “Tower Of Pain” released ahead of Dark Skies below.