There’s a moment on this ninth Underøath album when everything slows down. It’s a song called (No Oasis) – the sixth of the 10 that comprise Voyeurist – and it’s two minutes and 49 seconds of calm that feel like floating underwater. ‘No-one’s coming back for me,’ sings Aaron Gillespie at one point in a hushed almost-whisper. ‘You believed so hard you hollowed out your mind,’ he declares at another, before the track ends with an unnerving, maniacal laugh. Soothing and savage in equal measure, it then launches into Take A Breath, a full-throttle post-hardcore track that’s more typical of the rest of the album.
Of course, there’s nothing typical about Underøath. Formed in Tampa, Florida almost 25 years ago, the band have changed their style almost as much as they’ve changed line-ups, evolving steadily in that time. The raw, death metal-tinged brutality of 1999’s debut Act Of Depression morphed into the more polished melodic screamo of 2004’s They’re Only Chasing Safety and the metalcore mayhem 2006’s Define The Great Line, and the band continued to mess with the boundaries of those genres as the years went on. After 2010’s brutal seventh album Ø (Disambiguation), there was a brief, two-year hiatus in 2013, before the band finally returned with new music in 2018 with the relatively digestible atmospherics of Erase Me, which welcomed back drummer and clean vocalist Aaron into the fold alongside lead vocalist Spencer Chamberlain.
Whatever direction those albums and line-ups took, however, it was all underpinned by the band’s faith – or, perhaps more accurately, their struggles with it. That remains true on Voyeurist, which ups the ante on the religiosity, both in terms of imagery and sound. Opener Damn Excuses explodes in wrathful fury – a fire sermon straight from the depths of Hell – before being followed by the Enter Shikari-esque textures and incantations of Hallelujah. Elsewhere, I’m Pretty Sure I’m Out Of Luck And Have No Friends starts off tenderly and tentatively before its sinister crawl explodes into a caustic, devilish procession of heavy demonic riffs. That’s continued immediately with Cycle, a brooding surge of intensity that features a verse by Ghostemane, which only adds to harrowing atmosphere.