Album review: Defects – Modern Error

Trauma never truly leaves you. Its hurts and hang-ups, initial agonies and and echoing aftershocks have a way of staying buried within, carving away, shaping the person you will become. That doesn’t stop Defects frontman Tony Maue doing his damnedest to defiantly unload on the ascendant UK metallers’ expansive, explosive debut LP. Every moment of Modern Error seems marinated in experience. Every fury and fear feels drawn from a deeper place. Pain seeps from every pore.

Heart on sleeve and head held high, the singer is open about a troubled past that saw him taken into care at a young age, losing family, struggling to readjust. It’s easy to imagine him turning to the bands who so clearly influenced Defects during those dark years: Slipknot, Lamb Of God, Killswitch Engage, Bring Me The Horizon. The rapid-fire bludgeon of Scapegoat, the hands-aloft escapism of Dream Awake and outright anthem Echo Chamber see their cathartic influence repurposed to thrilling effect.

Crucially, Defects combine them into something new. Citing Linkin Park as another, less obvious, influence, they manage to cycle pounding riffs and big hooks into a soundscape with open space evocative of psychological isolation, and alternating harsh/clean vocals that often sound like a coversation with oneself. The use of disparate interludes (distorted radio signals, cars revving up, life-support monitors) initially jars a little, too, but eventually world-builds into the broader concept of a society unwilling or unable to look beneath the surface veneer at things that really matter.

By grandstanding closer Gone To Waste, the elements have pulled together into one of the most wrenchingly honest and compellingly ambitious Brit metal debuts of the year. Proof, indeed, that there’s little chance that these lads will fritter away even an ounce of the considerable talent they’ve got going for them.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Bury Tomorrow, In Flames, Bullet For My Valentine

Modern Error is released on May 24 via Mascot

Read this: “I had to start again and build a foundation out of nothing”: The trauma and triumph behind Defects’ debut album