#joshmiddleton

Sylosis | The New Flesh You know what always bothered me about Sylosis?

Not the music. Never the music.

It is the fact that for nearly twenty years now I still feel like I am explaining this band to people who should already know better. That weird middle ground they occupy, too big to be underground, too stubborn and riff obsessed to become proper mainstream metal darlings. I have had this same conversation since the Monolith days. Somebody mentions modern metal, starts listing bands that sound like they were assembled in laboratories by producers wearing backwards caps, and there I am again, the tired Portuguese bloke at the end of the table muttering “yeah but what about Sylosis you dumbass?”

The New Flesh feels like the sound of a band accepting exactly what they are. Not reinventing themselves. Not trying to relive Edge Of The Earth either, despite what some older fans probably still want. Those days are gone. I made peace with that years ago, somewhere between replaying old Emperor records at stupid volume and realising my knees now hurt after standing through entire concerts. Age humiliates everybody eventually.

Still, there is something admirable about the way Josh Middleton keeps dragging this band forward. At this point he basically is Sylosis. Last original member standing, carrying the whole thing on his back like some exhausted fantasy knight wandering through a dying kingdom with a broken sword and pure spite keeping him upright. Maybe that sounds dramatic, but metal has always deserved drama. That is half the point.

The record itself is leaner than old Sylosis. More direct. Less interested in disappearing into long progressive detours. Sometimes I miss that. I will admit it openly. I miss when metal bands were not afraid to get lost inside songs for eight or nine minutes just because they could. Maybe growing up on Pink Floyd, old Opeth and ridiculous Bal Sagoth records permanently damaged my brain. Could be worse.

But the thing is, The New Flesh works precisely because it understands restraint.

Beneath The Surface kicks the door open immediately with that violent mix of groove, melodeath and modern metalcore aggression, and from there the whole album moves with this sense of physical momentum. That word kept coming back into my head while listening to it. Physical. You can practically see the live setting baked into these songs. Sweaty clubs. Festival pits. Plastic beer cups flying through the air. Big stupid grins from people about to destroy their cervical vertebrae.

And honestly, good.

Metal forgot how to do that for a while.

Too much sterile perfection these days. Too much music that feels assembled on laptops instead of written by angry human beings. Sylosis still understand the sacred power of the riff. That old instinct Sabbath understood. Maiden understood. Testament understood. You give people riffs strong enough and they will follow you into war.

Middleton absolutely delivers on that front. The guitar work across this album is vicious without disappearing into pointless technical masturbation. That balance matters. A lot of modern players forget songs are supposed to live beyond YouTube clips titled INSANE GUITAR SKILLS COMPILATION or whatever nonsense algorithm culture feeds people now.

His vocals sound better than ever too. The harsh vocals especially. There is real venom in them. Not theatrical anger. Not fake tough guy nonsense. Genuine exhaustion and disgust boiling underneath everything. The clean vocals still will not convince everybody, and yeah, Erased leans dangerously close to modern metalcore territory at points, but even there the sheer conviction behind the performance saves it from collapsing into generic sludge.

And Ali Richardson, good boy. The drumming on this thing. All Glory, No Valour especially sounds like somebody chasing you downhill with a hammer.

That song actually reminded me of listening to the original old thrash bands in my shitty PC speakers, downloaded from AudioGalaxy, burned into cheap CD's, played over and over again in a wonky discman.

Mirror Mirror and Spared From The Guillotine push deeper into that hostility. Pure bile and paranoia running through both tracks. Then Adorn My Throne arrives with a broader atmosphere, almost cinematic without becoming pretentious about it. Sylosis have always been good at that balancing act. Just enough melody and atmosphere to widen the landscape without drifting into self indulgence.

Then the title track arrives and everything suddenly feels heavier somehow. The New Flesh has this ugly swagger to it. Like the album finally stops pretending there is any optimism left whatsoever. Massive grooves. World weary lyrics. Middleton practically sounds done with humanity altogether. Fair enough. Most days I understand the feeling completely. Spend ten minutes reading social media comments and suddenly Darkthrone starts sounding reasonable.

Now, Everywhere At Once. I already know some idiots are going to dislike this song. Maybe they already do. And I get it. It absolutely interrupts the flow of the album. The shift toward vulnerability is jarring on purpose. Acoustic passages, emotional openness, themes of distance and family and absence. I FUCKING LOVE IT. Maybe because life gets heavier in quieter ways as you age. Friends disappear into marriages, children, jobs, funerals, debt, illness. Suddenly songs about exhaustion and distance hit harder than another hundred blastbeats ever could. Funny how that works.

Circle Of Swords comes crashing in afterwards like somebody kicking open church doors during a funeral and starting a knife fight beside the coffin. Absolute whiplash. Exactly what the album needs at that moment. And from there Seeds In The River closes things out beautifully, pulling together melody, violence, atmosphere and melancholy into one final climb toward the horizon.

The album is not perfect.

The production is too polished sometimes. The bass disappears more than it should. A few transitions lean too heavily on modern groove metal habits that start feeling familiar after a while. Fans wanting the huge progressive ambition of older Sylosis records probably will not find it here either.

But honestly?

I would rather hear a band evolve imperfectly than calcify into self parody.

That is what makes The New Flesh work for me. It sounds hungry. Not desperate. Hungry. There is a difference. Too many metal bands reach a point where they are basically tribute acts covering their own past. Sylosis still sound like they have something to prove, even after all these years grinding away in the background while lesser bands somehow leapfrog them commercially. Metal is unfair like that sometimes.

Then again, metal has always been full of overlooked bands. That is part of the mythology too. The secret treasures passed between obsessed fans like contraband. Tape trading never really died, it just changed shape.

And somewhere out there tonight, some teenager is probably hearing Sylosis for the first time through Beats headphones, in Spotify, feeling that same electric shock the rest of us felt years ago discovering bands that seemed too good to remain ignored.

Hopefully they pay attention faster than most people did.

7.5/10

Disegni di Josh Middleton a parte, delicati, plastici e con un che di vagamente orientale/manga, la trama è un concentrato di idee banali da teen drama che poi sconfina nel gangster/thriller, con punte di assurdo e personaggi tutti incapaci di lasciare il segno, dalla rabbiosa e avventata Kiden alla (qui inspiegabilmente) catatonica Laura Kinney/X-23 (va bene che erano gli anni della moda emo/suicide girls però...), per concludere con tutti i "cattivi" senza spessore.

Scialba e sconclusionata allo stesso tempo.