10 Incredible Metal Albums You May Have Missed In 2021
5. Mirrors - Pupil Slicer
Pupil Slicer sounds exactly like a band called Pupil Slicer should sound. Ugly, painful and really, really angry, this is hardcore punk in its truest sense.
That’s not to say that the band is one dimensional, however, as their brutal battery of the senses is full of enough sudden drops and time shifts to make the most ardent of Dillinger Escape Plan worshippers take notice. Even when the music takes a moment to step back from the speed of sound, the sense of danger and unease is never far away. Katie Davies swaps her throat shredding roar for a sinister croon to make your skin crawl, and the mathcore squeals, crunching bass and suffocating drums make way for eerie sampled soundscapes.
In a mere 38 minutes, the band hurtle through 12 tracks of sonic punishment, sometimes forcing all of these disparate elements together into one breathless rush of a track, most keenly felt on the schizophrenic rage of ‘Wounds Upon My Skin’. There is a constant anxiety to this album, with each track, from the 48 second explosion of ‘Stabbing Spiders’ to the lurching 6 minute ‘Collective Unconscious’ rushing at you with such immediacy that you have no idea what to expect next.
Whatever else you might think, Pupil Slicer are here to make some noise, and it’s something they do very well.
Listen To: Wounds Upon My Skin