Detach The Islands’ New Chaotic Hardcore Album Blasts Unforgettable Wild Energy

The vicious new debut album from New York’s Detach The Islands packs a stunning amount of power. Called The Burden to Become Fact and out in full July 5, the release funnels wild mania into a potent end result that rather than erasing any power, simply focuses it. When turning on this new album, you’re thereby left like a weatherman in a wind tunnel for a television special about hurricanes — this music is absolutely uncompromising. The ten tracks pack a whole range of facets of this wild energy, from somber destruction to free-form mental mania, tying their strands together with an exhilarating rush.

The music is ultimately not easily categorized. While there are other luminary bands that specialize really memorably in various elements running through The Burden to Become Fact, it ultimately feels like its own creation and isn’t derivative. If you imagine what you might get from pouring The Dillinger Escape Plan into a blender with the relentless brutality of Converge and the attention to heavy musical insanity from a classic screamo band like Saetia or their modern heirs (one of the members is now in a band called Lytic), you might be close to grasping the impressive range of Detach The Islands.

The music really gets in your head thanks to the abrupt shifts the band take from their straightforward fury complete with seething heavy vocals like from a hardcore band into slower (only relatively) passages that pack more of a somber feel and give some context to what’s happening. The music feels like an account of a personal attack; it’s a confrontation with the “demons” that rather than existing as some looming, separate entity fit for a storybook, are the ones intertwined with the very essence of who you are as a person. In Detach The Islands’ accounting of the situation, there’s a subtle sense of power lurking around the edges, but it’s not the main attraction. Instead, their new album The Burden to Become Fact feels like straightforward chaotic devastation, like an actual hurricane came through and it’s now up to you — after surviving the night, of course — to look out over the wreckage and survey what’s truly happening.

5/5 Stars

Listen to some ahead of its full availability via Dental Records below.