Crystal Lake – The Weight Of Sound
Crystal Lake – The Weight Of Sound
Century Media
Release Date: 23/01/26
Review by Jon Deaux
8/10
Twenty-three years Crystal Lake has been doing this. Longer than some of their fans have been alive, longer than the average marriage lasts, longer than it takes most bands to implode over whose girlfriend gets backstage passes, and roughly the same amount of time I’ve been trying to convince myself that metalcore peaked in 2005. Spoiler alert: it didn’t, and this album proves it, though not without taking us on some familiar trips while occasionally just setting that territory on fire.
YD, the band’s guitar-wielding founder and Tokyo’s resident heavy music poet laureate, needs to make it clear that their “countless histories have been carved out and struggles that drew blood have been shared.” It’s all very metal and very deep and exactly the kind of stuff that happens when bands stick around for two decades, because, let’s face it, mayflies with abandonment issues have shorter lifespans than bands that play the heavy stuff.” Here’s the thing: all that bombast is, in fact, justified by “The Weight of Sound,” although their press release sounds like it was written by someone who found their new favorite tool on their word processor and perhaps mainlined an entire coffee pot while pondering their own mortality.
The title track is a different story altogether. Lead vocalist John (their sort-of-new frontman, because what is a legendary metalcore band without at least one lineup change that threatens to tear everything apart?) lays his emotions bare about the highs and lows of life on the road. Never being there when your family needs you. People thinking you’re crazy for choosing to live this crazy, stupid life. The crushing weight of the responsibility for sound itself resting on your shoulders like some sort of audio Atlas who’s stuck carrying this speakers’ cabinet up a hill for all eternity. “They only believe in you at the top of the mountain. You’re a fool along the way.”
Damn it, John. What happened to you? (Answer: The music industry. Or possibly the transmission in the van. Definitely the transmission in the van.)
This is the voice of a guy who’s lost too many nights in too many indistinguishable cities, staring at his phone because he’s missed birthdays and anniversaries and, quite possibly, his cat’s vet appointment, all as the cost of screaming into mics in front of audiences who will forget his name in the morning. But this guy still sounded like he was breathing, which is more than half the band of sleepy-time chuggers forwarding this style of music.
The guest appearance roster is a dream Heavy Music Fantasy Draft assembled by someone who has incredibly good taste and, you know, probably some blackmail evidence on their hands as well. Jesse Leach, David Simonich, Karl Schubach, Taylor Barber, and Myke Terry—These are not random features slapped into an album because it’ll give them more clicks on streaming and because they have to promote it across their labeled roster, ( that’s a thing that exists now too.) They are woven together, well-intentioned, and yet, they do not result in a hot mess of ego-driven vocal tantrums that are trying to out-scream one another in a demented vocal Olympics match that you pay good money to watch, no doubt.
“Everblack” featuring Simonich is pure, unadulterated chaos that you want to flip a table you do not even have, you understand, yet you cannot possibly discount it because it is probably, no doubt, life-changing in some inexplicable, possibly very bad ways that you have yet to consider because it is chaos in every single, wonderful
And now, finally, we have to talk about the big furry creature in the morgue: of course, this is metalcore, 2026, a style of music that has been dead more often than disco, hair metal, and my will to live aggregated. You can guess the pattern. These guitar parts are third-generation cousins to what you’ve heard a million other times, maybe while stuck in your local suburbia commute or working out your tiny trust issues in your local gym mirror. The twist: “Crystal Lake” has been honing this scalpel for twenty-plus years, and it shows. This isn’t a reinvention of the wheel—instead, they make you the best goddamned wheel you have heard in forever, then set it ablaze and push it down a hill right into your mug.
Production on this thing is sharp but no less heavy than it needs to be—not suffocatingly brutal for brute brutality’s sake’s sake—but sharp enough to still retain this edge of raw steel that makes metalcore good in the first place. This does not sound like it’s been calculated for optimal levels of breakdowns per minute.
“Blüdgod” (yes, with the umlaut, because apparently we’re still in the year of our lord 2025, and you know what? I’m not even mad about it) is straight up tougher than it should be. It has that great blend of heaviness and rage that gets you pumped up enough to smash through walls, and probably walls owned by people you don’t like either. “King Down” shows what this band is capable of in being able to construct an actual song as opposed to what amounts to a mess of breakdowns taped together by duct tape, screaming, and prayer that kids are still going to mosh for this crap.
“Neversleep” with Myke Terry delivers on the name—this is a jittery nervous energy that’ll make you wonder how you’d manage six shots of espresso in one sitting and foretell the impending doom that is surely to come.
“The Undertow” featuring Karl Schubach sweeps you under with a melodic weight that Misery Signals wowed audiences with all those years ago, and it’s a pleasure to see that withering sound is still potent. “Crossing Nails” is simply suffering, the aural manifestation of seeking forgiveness even as you go further into depravity.
But “Coma Wave” ends it all with enough atmosphere to remind you that yeah, these guys have thoughts outside of moshing, that they’ve been paying attention to the last two decades of heavy music developments, and they aren’t simply dressing up as their 2002 versions with better equipment and creakier joints.
The actual accomplishment here isn’t innovating a new thing, it’s: Crystal Lake has taken everything they’ve learned in 23 years of rolling with touring vans that probably should’ve been wrecked, thru lineup fiascos that could’ve killed the band, a hostile music industry, a streaming economy that makes medieval serfdom seem lavish, and presumably their existential crises that spawned their new life with vocalist John, and distilled it down to these 11 songs to prove their right to exist in that scene that devours bands and excretes reunion festivals).”
But is it perfect? Of course not. Does the seventh track sort of melt into the eighth if you’re listening to it and not paying attention? Hell, yes. Will you be able to recall each song separately from the others after hearing it the first time? Odds are, no, unless you possess the photographic memory of the sort of people usually found among people with obsessive pursuits and resultant mathematical or linguistic genius. Is there stuff where you’ll sit there and go, “Oh, yeah, and I heard the same guitar riff on the aff- or cit reference track from the aforementioned August Burns Red CD”? Sure. But who needs originality if it’s crafted as sharply as it is?
Put this on when you want to exorcise a few demons, remember why you originally fell in love with this genre back before it got a soundtrack on a TiKTok for gym bros doing their transformation videos or just want to experience something other than the weight of being a responsible adult right now. “The Weight of Sound” comes through with the kind of passion to make you feel like maybe everything is going to be alright for the next 40 minutes or so.
John’s right about having that kind of weight around his neck. The average band after two decades plus would be phoning it in, doing a reunion tour, and/or desperately following some new trend like a middle-aged man attempting to grasp what his kids like about the latest thing. Crystal Lake sounds hungry. Mad. Driven. As if they still had something to prove when they’ve already had something to prove seventeen times already. They’ve earned their right at the table even if it’s full of upstart young punks who grew up idolizing them and are currently attempting to take them down.
There’s something beautifully subversive about a band at this stage in their career and rocking as hard as they do. They could rest on their laurels. They could take the safe route. They could be that nostalgic touring act, playing off their past successes. But they chose to release an album that sounds as if they are still living or die, that they are still scrapping for relevancy in a world that changes at a rate that no one can keep up with. That means something. That means a lot.
It won’t bathe the unbelievers in conversion-induced enlightenment or change the game. It won’t cause people to forget about the classics or challenge the metalcore playbook. But it’s sure as heck a great addition to a legacy that most bands will kill for. Done with a level of precision and passion that only comes from having done it for a long enough period that you know exactly what you’re doing.
For fans of: The raging melodicism of Killswitch Engage, The technical mastery of August Burns Red, The emotional jabs of Misery Signals, And anyone who still cares about metalcore, which has to prove it can mean something other than “I’m sad” or “My ex-girlfriend is literally Satan” or whatever angst-ridden nonsense posers are spouting this week.
Skip if: you are one of those people who thinks that metalcore died after *Alive*/*Just Breathing* and that nothing will ever shake you from this opinion, you are also sensitive to guest vocals, or you have made your peace with the void and do not require ‘Japanese men screaming about the power of sound’ in order to feel alive.
Long live Crystal Lake. Long live the weight. Long live whatever delusion lets musicians continue doing that impossible task for decades when any sensible person would have gotten a real job with insurance.
I now need to ponder my choices after listening to ‘Blüdgod’ a good seventeen times.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Everblack (feat. David Simonich)
02. Blüdgod (feat. Taylor Barber)
03. Neversleep (feat. Myke Terry)
04. King Down
05. The Undertow (feat. Karl Schubach)
06. The Weight Of Sound
07. Crossing Nails
08. Dystopia (feat. Jesse Leach)
09. Sinner
10. Don’t Breathe
11. Coma Wave
LINKS:
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