Our Last Night

Packed to the brim with breakdowns, singing/screaming vocal swapping, and the ubiquitous “bass bomb,” We Will All Evolve, the second album from Our Last Night, delivers ten solid tracks of metalcore fury. Treading in territory similar to contemporaries like Atreyu and Asking Alexandria, the band delivers everything you’d expect from them in terms of cathartic aggression. It’s hard to deny that this is a roller coaster of an album. The changes between the album's heavier moments and the singing passages manage to take the disc from meat-headed aggression to uplifting, with songs like “Into the Future” showing a real reverence for the genre's emo-punk roots, with almost soaring guitar work making the song feel hopeful without allowing it to get too light. The end passages of “Across the Ocean” have a similar dynamic, maintaining enough of an edge during the more positive sections that the crushing breakdown that closes the songs out doesn’t feel too out of place. While Our Last Night does an excellent job of handling the more upbeat moments on the album, the heavier sections aren’t anything that fans of the genre haven’t heard before. This is an album that will certainly appeal to metalcore die-hards, but might fail impress anyone looking for more innovation. ~ Gregory Heaney