The record opens in fine fashion with “Hand of the Divine,” which immediately stakes its claim upon The Agony Scene’s upper echelon and perfectly sets the stage for what’s to come. Tormentor is one of those records that grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go. Tormentor continues the evolution toward a more traditional-metal based sound-picking up, more or less, where that third album left us more than a decade ago, while also reintroducing elements of melodic death and other extreme metals into their sound. Yet, by 2007’s Get Damned, many of the traditional metalcore tropes had been dropped entirely, in favor of a more thrash-oriented sound. The Darkest Red (2005) achieved a similar effect, albeit with a greater emphasis on melody, by combining Slipknot‘s nu-metal sensibilities with a more melodic death metal template. Many of their peers have succeeded by simply cementing their relevance in recent years, but the Tusla natives have truly outdone themselves: delivering what is undoubtedly the best record of their career and one which sits alongside Bleed From Within‘s Era (2018) as the gold standard by which all further comers will be measured.Īlthough The Agony Scene were quickly pigeon-holed with the metalcore crowd off the back of their self-titled debut (2003), their successive offerings did little to support such categorization. However, few have been as unexpected or as outstanding as The Agony Scene‘s Tormentor. 2018 has seen some surprising, and surprisingly solid, comebacks from many of the metalcore and NWOAHM bands that populated the early 2000s.
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