Album review: The Plot In You – The Volumes Series

You’ve got to love it when a plan comes together. Viral success may have made The Plot In You seem like an overnight sensation to uninitiated onlookers, but it’s a breakthrough that’s been years in the making.

Dig into a bulging back-catalogue and you’ll find five albums of variable quality filling the decade between 2011 and 2021 before the current EP-driven era began. Even their online breakthrough came in two stages, with 2017’s Feel Nothing being certified gold after catching fire on TikTok back in 2022, before MAPHRA’s cover of Silence earlier this year raised the Ohio post-hardcore crew’s profile again, introducing fresh legions of fans.

It’s fitting, then, that their most definitive release so far is not an album full of new material, but a compilation of the four aforementioned EPs, comprising 12 songs trailing back to 2023, only one of which fans haven’t had access to before. That might disappoint those looking to gorge on new music from Landon Tewers and co, but it’s a prime opportunity for newcomers to bring themselves up to speed with one of the most exciting bands in modern alt music, and for hardcore fans to take stock of how intricately their beauty and ballast ties together.

There’s immense quality right from the beginning, of course. The serrated riffs of Divide and Closure open up into superb melodic choruses, albeit ones obviously indebted to Bring Me The Horizon and Bad Omens. Been Here Before and Pretend draw more from the heavier end of pop punk. Ending Vol. 3, Spare Me could almost have come from Spiritbox.

But those songs are most valuable in contextualising Vol. 4. Combining soft-strummed fragility and pulsing industrial without any jarring awkwardness, Silence is a song that could only ever have come from The Plot In You. You Get One cranks up the synths and swagger further still, sounding thrillingly like a Gen-Z Nine Inch Nails. Then Carved, the unreleased track, peels back the skin to show the beating heart beneath it all. It's a towering love song with fire in its eyes and mercury in its veins, destined to be sung with phone-lights held aloft.

The Volumes Series is a landmark for The Plot In You. But for fans, it’s even more of a tantalising waymarker, a tease of how incredible their next album proper could truly be.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Bad Omens, Bring Me The Horizon, Northlane

The Volume Series is released on July 10 via Fearless