SOUND BITES

There has always been a degree of controlled chaos at play in the music of Code Orange; as they have progressed over the last decade or so, they have built a reputation not just for threading the needle between the brutal and the melodic, but for indeed pulling heavy music kicking and screaming out some of its most tired clichés. On their last outing, 2017's Forever , they pushed at the boundaries of what was expected even for them, allowing glitchy industrial flourishes into their hardcore/extreme compositions as a way to keep things unsettling and interesting. Moreover, they dared to swing the pendulum further to the other side as well, letting themselves explore their more accessible urges. The result was a minor hit in Reba Meyers-sung alt-rock howler Bleeding in the Blur , which led to Code Orange being commissioned to write the entrance theme for WWE wrestler Bray Wyatt, in what I think is one of the oddest ways a heavy band can rise to fame. Minor successes aside, it...

In the world of heavy music, bands aren't usually encouraged to stretch the parameters of their core sound; whichever subgenre you come in on is the one you're expected to stay on. So for Code Orange, with their background in punk and hardcore, Forever is a risky project; at its foundation, it's very much a hardcore record, but there are flourishes of outside influence to be heard as well. Industrial, mathcore, nu-metal, and even dashes of shoegaze and melodic alt-rock are added as spice. Still, the common thread is the bloody sinew of bone-crushing guitars and pummeling drums. It's what keeps Forever consistent, and helps any deviations from the script at least seem not so deviant in the context of all the chaos. This is also a record that keeps a tentative distance from clichés of the genre and, though there are certainly a fair share of prototypical breakdowns, the songs as a whole are approached with as much a sense of discovery as one of reverence. At the end...