Amygdala’s Thrillingly Harsh New Heavy Punk Album Confronts Deeply Set Turmoil

Amygdala’s new album Our Voices Will Soar Forever is a welcome brutal confrontation and reckoning with pain. It’s invigorating, but not for the faint of heart. The Texas heavy-hitters deliver a panoply of sounds and textures that focus on a key point — emotional violence and destruction. The band sound like they have found themselves in a very tangibly tight situation and are fighting for escape and control of the darkness enveloping them. Their new album quickly proves an anthem of the despondent that’s easy for a heavy music aficionado to get behind.

Overall, their focus really remains with that visceral emotional desperation throughout the work, both through the various shades of heavy they present and the various but related topics that they walk through. Their music feels like a thick, sludgy grind, upping the ante through the roof on a style that was already inescapably poignant. They focus on raw, in-your-face thrashing, but they eventually open up to other textures too, like running through a sonic mud pit of dredged out musical muck that is perfectly fitting. Ultimately, even well apart from vocalist Bianca Quiñones’ lyricism, Amygdala’s music itself feels angry and hurt. The band have encapsulated an experience of confronting metaphorical demons from the darkest pits and thrown it at the listener, joining a collective begging drive for some control of the situation.

Really digging into what Quiñones has to say adds significantly to the experience of despondency associated with Our Voices Will Soar Forever, which ends up feeling like a cleansing, invigorating light where there’s been darkness for too long. She shares emotionally brutal tales, lashing the listener with personal perspectives on abuse, mental illness, socially entrenched sexism, and more. She tells stories that will stick with the listener; she’s not remotely just standing on a soapbox here. Rather, the band together sound and feel like they’re imploring the listener to pay attention to the issues they focus on and hang onto them as tangibly personally relevant. It’s a dose of reality shot right through the arm, which can be painful, but the result can be exciting and worth it.

5/5 Stars

Listen below via Bandcamp. The full album drops May 3 via Prosthetic Records.