Boundaries – Yearning: The unbeautiful after Review

Boundaries came into my life fairly recently, thanks to the Garza Podcast. On the podcast, a few of the band talked through their influences, played through some riffs, and had a vibe that made me check out their stuff. After listening to their last record, Death Is Little More, I fell in love. Then, hearing they had a new album on the way, I felt spoiled.

Yearning: The unbeautiful after comes just two years after their last record, and with that being my first experience with the band, I was hoping for more of that killer, brutal, aggressive sound, and that’s certainly what we got with this album. I’ve had this album in rotation for a solid month or two now, and it’s a strong contender for album of the year for me, but there is one glaring issue that may knock it from the top spot.

This album is a brutal onslaught to the ears; there’s no question about that. It’s disgustingly heavy; it absolutely rips through the airwaves and is just one of those albums that has you pulling a face every time the sludgy, in-your-face breakdowns come smashing through your eardrums. There’s a level of aggressiveness here that I’ve not heard in metalcore for a while. It’s almost pushing into slam/deathcore, but reigns it in before things get a little too out of hand.

This is something I love about this record. When it wants to absolutely tear your face off, it does. When it wants to give you a second to get your bearings, it lets you do that, too. With big choruses and clean vocal sections that you’d think would feel out of place, they just work to give you breathing room – though for only a second. It’s chaotic, but in a really good way. And some of those screams – oh boy, some of those screams are NASTY.

That being said, the album can, at times, be a bit of an assault on the senses. It intentionally knocks your head back and forth. It’s relentless with its explosive moments; it’s the musical equivalent of pressurising carbon to create diamonds. While it may be somewhat exhausting to have heavy metalcore give your head a good pounding, there is a diamond in all of that rough with Yearning: The unbeautiful after.

Sadly, one thing I personally can’t shake is the poor mixing on this album. I’m not sure what producer Drew Fulk was doing with this record, but everything seems to be pushed to the middle. It’s almost as if it was mixed down in mono and, while mastering, a layer of synthetic stereo wideness was applied to give some of the transients room to breathe. It’s not something you may immediately notice listening to this album front to back, but mix the tracks in a playlist with other actual wide tracks, and you’ll instantly hear just how horrible this mix is. When played alongside other heavy records from this year, like Loathe‘s A Stranger to You, or more recently, A Night In Texas‘s The Darkest Side of Humanity, it just feels flat.

Now, the band did kind of address this in the aforementioned podcast. After the drop of their first single, comments mentioned the poor mix, and apparently they fixed it, only for Sumerian Records to use the wrong mix on the next single. So honestly, I don’t know which mix this one is, whether the new or the old one, but either way, this is genuinely the only reason why this album doesn’t get top marks from me, and it’s a shame.

Musically, Yearning: The unbeautiful after an absolutely killer album. Lyrically, too. Boundaries aren’t afraid to really dig into some uncomfortable, confrontational, and dark topics, which I think further elevates this album.