The Five Hundred – Ghostwriter
The Five Hundred – Ghostwriter
Prime Collective
Release Date: 28/02/2025
Review by Beth Morait
10/10
British Progressive Metalcore/ Djent band The Five Hundred have been a name on the scene for over a decade now, and they are, in my opinion, a stand-out band in the genre. I saw them live at Rabidfest 2019, and they blew me away then. Now they’re hitting the scene with their 3rd full-length, and damn it’s good. By the time I got 2 songs in on my first listen, I’d already decided that it’s likely this album would be making my album of the year list 10 months from now. After 3 listens of the full thing, it is absolutely going to be up there, potentially in with a shout of making my number one spot. I’m confident that, despite the amount of good music that’s already landed this year, this album will be hard to beat.
The press release describes “Ghostwriter” as ‘a harrowing sonic journey through a dystopian nightmare, exploring themes of societal collapse, human despair, and the fragility of freedom under the crushing weight of oppression’. And straight from the first track, there’s an air of desolate sadness, that weighs you down in its density and melancholy. But with this being The Five Hundred, it’s also a masterful display of extreme technical prowess and incredibly intricate and Progressive songwriting. This is a band who have the ability to crush you not only with their riffs, but with their gentler passages, and it’s simply mesmerising. It’s not like any other Metalcore you will hear, as it’s far more Melodic. But it’s also too Metalcore to be just straight-up Modern Metal. Very damn clever is what it is.
So, in terms of sound, we have spikey crushing Guitar tones, and rumbling Bass, but the percussion is at a much more tolerable pace than you often find, which allows for it to be more intricate and Progressive, without beating you to death by the 3rd track. Atmospherics feature heavily throughout the album too, with a variety of samples, including some spoken word snippets. But they’re not relied upon to create the music, they simply add an extra dimension. And above all that we have stunning vocals. A good mix of tortured growls, and some of the most tonally pleasing cleans you’re likely to hear.
Guest artists feature across this album as well, in the shape of Siamese, ten56, As Everything Unfolds, and Sikth. The fact that so many other people want to guest with The Five hundred really does speak volumes about their quality as a band in my opinion.
This is one of the rare occasions that I can say there isn’t a single duff track on the album. It’s all perfect. Powerful. Real. Something that isn’t just a bunch of tunes collected in one place that you can listen to, but rather a body of work that must be absorbed as a whole, and that you feel in your soul. And that, my friends, is a very, very great accomplishment. Whatever you like in the Metal world, you absolutely need to listen to this album. I’ve already pre-saved it in my Spotify, and it will be going on loud in my car, probably many, many times back-to-back, from release day onwards!
‘Rainmaker’ (feat. ten56) Official Lyric Video
TRACKLISTING:
01. The Death Of All We Know (feat. Siamese)
02.Rainmaker (feat. ten56)
03. Ruin
04. New World
05. In The Dark
06. Dragged Out (feat. As Everything Unfolds)
07. Bodies
08. Empty House
09. 20 Days
10. Echoes
11. Chaos Sermon (feat. Sikth)
12. Where Is Our Humanity
LINKS:
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