Rock Hard Festival Greece 2025 was a pure sonic assault on Athens and wow, what an absolute monster of a weekend it was! The 2025 […]
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| Bands: | Poison The Well |
| Release: | Peace In Place |
| Genre: | Metalcore |
| Country: | USA |
| Release Date: | 20th of March, 2026 |
| Released via | Sharptone Records |
What year is it? A lot of OG metalcore fans have most likely asked themselves this question after Floridian legends Poison The Well dropped their first single, “Trembling Level“, out of the blue after almost 20 years. Although the band had previously become active again to celebrate the anniversary of their landmark and classic metalcore release The Opposite of December, no one really expected Poison The Well to become a permanent thing again. With that single, longtime fans were immediately back on board, especially when it came to hoping for a new full-length release after 2009’s underrated gem The Tropic Rot. Now, with Peace in Place, the genre-defining band is officially back. But comebacks of this nature tend to fall into either the “they still got it” (At The Gates, Carcass) or the “yeah, whatever” (Refused, At The Drive-In) category. So where does Peace in Place belong?
While one might have expected the band to further diversify the surf-rock-infused post-hardcore sound they established on Versions and cemented on The Tropic Rot, Poison The Well surprisingly chose to refocus on their humble beginnings and emphasize the harsher nature of their sound. Peace in Place’s sonic approach can best be described as a mixture of their run from Tear From the Red to Versions, with more weight on the former than the latter. This becomes apparent as soon as the Botch-like throwback feedback and clean vocal intro to “Wax Mask” breaks into Ryan Primack’s dissonant chords, Chris Hornbrook’s off-kilter rhythms, and Jeffrey Moreira’s agonizing screams. All ten tracks operate firmly within the harsher spectrum of the band’s well-established signature sound, even more so than the two pre-released singles “Thoroughbreds” and “Everything Hurts” initially suggested.
Anyone wishing for a return to more caveman-like breakdowns and hardcore energy will be pleased to find plenty of those moments in tracks like “Primal Bloom”, “Weeping Tones” or the crushing “Melted.” Closer “Plague Them the Most” even features blast beats for the first time on a Poison The Well record. However, that doesn’t mean the band has forgotten how to craft distinctive leads or memorable chorus melodies. In fact, the aforementioned tracks feature some of their strongest hook lines to date, once again proving why Moreira remains one of the best frontmen in the game. While his screams sound more gruff and throaty than on previous records, his clean segments are still chilling. Whether it’s the earworm hooks of “Everything Hurts” and “Weeping Tones” or the ’90s alternative metal soar of “Bad Bodies” he still knows how to keep listeners engaged.
At the same time, the Western and surf rock influences in the guitar work (Ryan Primack is a huge Morricone—and possibly Beach Boys—fan) continue to shine through, making Poison The Well’s sound unmistakably their own. Production-wise, Will Putney (who hardly needs an introduction) has crafted a suitably heavy sound with his signature drum-heavy punch, while still leaving enough room for the unique leads, riffs (see “Primal Bloom”), and vocal melodies to stand out.
Poison The Well don’t miss a beat on their comeback record. Their sixth album fires on all cylinders, triggering mosh muscle memory, provoking sing-alongs, and inducing head-bobbing as if they had never left in the first place. The tracklist is concise, dynamic, and free of filler throughout its runtime. Peace in Place could easily have been released between Tear From the Red and their second catalogue masterpiece You Come Before You. With this comeback record, Poison The Well comfortably sit alongside Converge on this year’s metalcore throne, reclaiming their rightfully earned laurels.
Black metal is a genre that has an awful lot of stigma attached to it. Murder, arson, cults, more murder – it’s a pretty dark and dingy corner of the music world that seems perpetually incapable of detaching itself from those traits. Well, until you discover Gaerea, that is. The Portuguese unit have been redefining what it means to be a black metal band in the modern scene, adding brighter colours to their sonic palette than their peers, and it’s drawn those in the know closer to them like a corpse-painted moth to a flame. Their new nine-track offering ‘Loss’ sees them add some fancy new tricks into their repertoire, producing their most ambitious record yet.
The band are, and have always been, anonymous. Now that Sleep Token have become a global phenomenon there will be many newcomers to the project that call copycat or claim the band are jumping on the mask-wearing bandwagon, but Gaerea’s anonymity represents something very different. They aren’t worshipping a deity, they aren’t world-building or storytelling. They’re removing their identity from their music so they can explore their musical direction on a blank canvas, embracing whatever their palette decides to splash on it. On ‘Loss’, that creative freedom has painted an incredibly colourful picture.
The core DNA of Gaerea is still very much intact on this record, and it sounds just as impassioned and visceral as ever. Tracks like the blistering ‘Submerged’ and the relentless ‘Phoenix’ rocket forward with a fierce intensity, laced with a post metal serenity that makes everything sound that little bit more epic. There are some ominously dark numbers here too, most notably ’Uncontrolled’, and the dense smog seeping from its main motif. As mentioned earlier, though, this record has some curveballs that really set it apart from their previous records. The biggest, and perhaps most unexpected surprise on ‘Loss’, is the singing.
Some fans of the band will love the clean singing on this album and embrace it warmly. Others will completely stand against it. One thing is undeniable though; it fits, and it’s performed with such an impressive range and emotive intensity that suggests it’s a trick they’ve been sat on for a hot minute. Album opener ‘Luminary’ starts off as a wrecking ball of power, giving way to a huge chorus that gives the song a gigantic lift. ‘Cyclone’ is stunning and it wouldn’t sound anywhere near as moving if it wasn’t sung so beautifully, the softer moments allowing the sharper ones to cut even deeper.
A nine track album may seem short on the surface, but the runtime clocks in at around 46 minutes and none of it feels like filler. Every track is intentional, placed in the track listing purposefully, and the way the record closes out is magical. The expansive tones of ‘LBRNTH’ set the tone for ‘Nomad’, a track that feels incredibly cinematic. The chorus cries of “I am the nomad, carrying a weight that I’ll never show” are spine-tingling, the feral drum-work and intricate guitar lines surrounding it locked in a tug of war between melody and malevolence. The final track, ‘Stardust’, is the showstopper here. There’s delicate guitar licks, atmospheric electronics, guttural screams, devastating percussion and bags upon bags of emotion. It’s both a thematic and sonic bookend, a firm and well-rounded full stop to a breathtaking album.
This is an incredibly important record in Gaerea’s discography, sure, but it’s a little bit more than that. The experimentation, the risks, the ambition; it’s their most accessible album by a country mile, but it doesn’t feel like they’ve had to sacrifice any of their punch to achieve that. ‘Loss’ is an album that’s been influenced by black metal but not defined by it, and it sets the band an incredibly big challenge. How on Earth do they top this?
DAVE STEWART
In the spring of 2000, Fiddler Records released the first Dashboard Confessional album, Swiss Army Romance. Chris Carrabba saw the record as a side project to Further Seems Forever, the band he had been singing for since 1998. Most of the record features Carrabba and a guitar singing songs he felt were too personal to record with Further Seems Forever. Swiss Army Romance would steer Emo in a singer-songwriter direction, stripped down of instruments but not feelings. It established a vulnerability that would be mocked not just with Dashboard, but throughout the whole genre. Carrabba chose the name Dashboard Confessional based on a lyric from the record’s second track, “The Sharp New Hint of Tears.”
Further Seems Forever was chugging along as Dashboard Confessional was gaining steam. After releasing a song on a compilation and a split with fellow Florida band Recess Theory, the band recorded their first record, The Moon Is Down, on Tooth & Nail. Carrabba recorded the vocals for the record after he had returned from a Dashboard Confessional tour and decided that he would leave the band to pursue his own solo endeavor. The record features Carrabba’s vocals on ten tracks, including the single “Snowbirds and Townies.”
By this time, Carrabba, in full Dashboard Confessional mode, was playing solo shows in venues and working on new songs. Choosing to play smaller and more intimate venues, Carrabba cultivated a show where everyone could participate and was encouraged to sing along with him. Eventually, he started working on the follow-up to Swiss Army Romance. Despite mostly keeping the same stripped-down format as the first record, The Places You Have Come To Fear the Most released in 2001 on Vagrant Records feels more like an extension but doesn’t feel repetitive.
While both records have small sounds and big feelings, The Places You Have Come To Fear the Most’s opening song “This Brilliant Dance” is a song about the invincible feeling of falling in love for the first time. It’s a nice contrast before the heartbreak to come, and it helped the record become a defining document of early-2000s emo that would shape the sound and emotional vocabulary of the scene.
While Swiss Army Romance was mostly a solo effort, this record features a full band on four of the songs, including The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most’s lone single, a re-recording of “Screaming Infidelities.” While Swiss Army Romance did not have anything that would be considered a single, this was one of the more popular songs off Dashboard Confessional’s first record.
This song and “The Best Deceptions” both explore the fallout of being cheated on. Carrabba’s lyrics of betrayal and painful memories are contrasted by pushing the hope, wonder, and uncertainty of “This Brilliant Dance” and tipping it into literally the worst-case scenario. While Carrabba’s guitar and vocals don’t change much on “Screaming Infidelities,” the addition of the band really gives the song the emphasis it needs in certain spots.
For an album that a lot of people associated with crying and whining, tracks like “Saints and Sailors” and “The Good Fight” show how sharply Carrabba captured the emotional messiness of a relationship unraveling. This record is a great document of a relationship gone sour, and while it’s something most people will eventually experience, Carrabba’s lyrics make the imagery easy to picture or inhabit. This is a question you can probably ask in regards to most emo music of this era: Did we long for love, the rejection, or the assumption we’d just be in a terrible relationship? If this had ever crossed your mind, you probably related to “Again I Go, Unnoticed.”
An album with so many feelings and emotions needs a definitive closing statement. “This Bitter Pill” is a fantastic closer. All of the songs of resentment, harsh truth, and disappointments have built up to this moment. If the title track “The Places You Have Come To Fear the Most” was about a fear of showing these emotions, “This Bitter Pill” is the “fuck you” moment.
The narrative of this record and the juxtaposition of its sides are pretty cut and dry. By the end of “The Places You Have Come To Fear the Most,” the narrator is charged and ready to confront these things. By the end of “This Bitter Pill,” these words are emblazoned into the ether by Carrabba singing with everything he’s got and left hoarse, ending the record in a place of catharsis and new beginnings.
Eventually, mainstream success would catch up to him and change the trajectory of the band and the type of songs written. I turned to Dashboard Confessional after putting my heart out there a couple of times and getting it stepped on. The songs on both Swiss Army Romance and The Places You Have Come To Fear the Most were soothing to the nth degree, if only because real heartbreak would eventually come to me later.
While Carrabba’s descent into songs with electric guitars wasn’t as dramatic as when Bob Dylan went electric, it definitely changed the trajectory of the band. After the success of The Places You Have Come To Fear the Most, Carrabba released a pair of EPs, The Summer Kiss and So Impossible. The band then released A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar. It was the first album built around fully electric songs, a departure from the intimate, too-personal-for-a-full-band approach that defined his early acoustic work.
There was a lot of shame around buying a Dashboard Confessional record, especially after The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most took off. It’s funny in hindsight because the vulnerability people mocked is what made these records resonate. I remember when I bought A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar at Tower Records, there this judgy store clerk who tried to chastise me for my purchase. She went on a diatribe about how Chris Carrabba was nothing but a Backstreet Boy with tattoos. I think I asked, “Don’t the Backstreet Boys have tattoos also?” I’m still not sure who that question actually helped. Two decades later, the shame is gone, but the honesty remains. That’s why these records hit as hard as they do.
Now available for pre-order HERE “Vindicate” SONG and MUSIC VIDEO is OUT NOW Click here to watch the NSFW music video HERE 2026 Headline Tour […]
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