Virtue In Vain – Nothing Is All I Am EP
Virtue In Vain – Nothing Is All I Am EP
Self-Released
Release Date – 23/01/2026
Review by Jon Deaux
7.5/10
There’s just kind of a type of weather pattern that exists above Wales, and it’s low clouds and rain kind of sliding in at a 90-degree angle and just the type of feeling that your inner monologue has developed its own union against you. “Nothing Is All I Am” by Virtue In Vain is clearly an EP that was penned inside that type of weather front as it was screaming towards the horizon and as the horizon was screaming back.
This is part three in this trilogy about being human and realizing that it is just so incredibly frustrating. There was “For All You Know Is The Mask I Wore” before this one, which was a nice-and-polite-way of saying that being yourself is just an illusion that you put on for strangers. And then there is “Dusk // Dawn”. That one is when that illusion becomes an extremely long and terrible night. And now we are on to morning after, which is when the party is over, when your mind is replaying its worst hits over and over again, and when so-called “self care” is a joke. You did it, though. You are back.
The EP begins with ‘Split’, a release that explodes instead of starting. It is as if one finds himself in the middle of a panic attack and begins to apologize for the furniture. The lyrics are now replaced by emotional shrapnel that blasts from the chest. This is not a show-off act. This act of the release of emotion where catharsis gets impolite enough to throw chairs.
Lead single ‘Blood Eyes’ launches as if it’s running late to an important apocalypse—maybe an implosion. Chugging riffs are certainly sufficiently massive to be bitten into: Mason Williams saws furiously as if trying to break his way through an image reflected from a funhouse mirror. Drumming by Daniel Bryant is more about the enforcement of the rhythm than its actual pounding, a musical phenomenon akin to having a child reduced to obedience by a party guest blowing a whistle; Calm down! If the metal core genre has long been the butt of ridicule due to its emoting, this track has all the elements to respond with a resounding “Why should it be any different?”
But it is exactly here, though, that the track is pulled out from under its rug via a cringe-worthy moment of self-reflection; indeed, it is in such an element of the EP, and not in its heaviness, that the venom lies—not in the heavy sounds, but in their truthfulness.
It weaves through a bunch of trails of thought that can easily recurse in a path that’s been trod many times before, like examples of catastrophizing, self-sabotage, and reliving past moments in the hope that perhaps, just perhaps, they might magically qualify for the takeaway lesson that could’ve been gleaned from them in the first place.
But with the presence of ‘Echoes and The Wit & I’ the songs start to take on a shape that’s not so much a musical set but a dissection.
What Virtue In Vain are so great about is they don’t offer a watered-down, bourgie concern for mental illness in their own EPs. No platitudes, no easily digestible “answers”, no mawkish acoustic song to soothe the wounds and reassure the listener in gentle, strummed cadence, “Oh, yea, I’m fine!”
“Nothing Is All I Am” acknowledges that the torn-apart, screwed-up piece of neural revival isn’t a blockbuster finish, isn’t a supervillain flourish, isn’t a dendrobium orchid strewn lavishly across a warm cinema-claw-scarred hardwood coffee table because, let’s face it, putting a torn-apart mind back together again is a mess and a half, a gutter-scarring, stuttering, and sometimes ugly process—and so, in extant ways, Nothing’s EP is strangely, almost comfortingly pleasant to hear, a large, ugly, bruised, and blundering mess in so many ways for an EP titled Nothing and nothing else.
“Nothing Is All I Am” is a grim, parasitic, and devastatingly, humanly good EP. It’s not quite a masterpiece, but it’s certainly a master’s degree in feeling terrible and making something useful out of the debris.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Split
02. Blood Eyes
03. Between Reflections & Silence
04. Echoes
05. The Wit & I.
LINKS:
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