Sylosis – The New Flesh
Sylosis – The New Flesh
Nuclear Blast
Release Date: 20/02/26
Review by Jon Deaux
8.7/10
It is a heartwarming experience when a band claims to be ‘heavier’ than ever before. It is akin to listening to a politician campaign on how he will cure the social ills of a country by speaking louder. In extreme music, loud is good, subtle is bad, heresy lurks around every corner, and I suspect someone in Reading is still searching for the spirit of teenage angst which they wasted hours with messing about with an amp to try and get the wallpaper to fall off the house in horror.
Twenty-five years into their crusade of imposing no discernible difference whatsoever from the concept of silence and good taste, Sylosis offer us their seventh full-length with the subtlety and finesse of a brick through your nan’s greenhouse. “The New Flesh” finds Middleton and his merry band of ne’er-do-wells doing exactly what they’ve been doing all those years: making riffs that could strip the paint from the wallpaper, but this time with the added benefit of middle-aged angst, parental worry, and the growing realization that we’re all going to need the apocalypse to wipe this mess we call civilization from the face of the earth anyway.
The press releases boast of ‘renewed intent’ and the like, but that’s what they probably say when they’ve run out of superlatives and need to shift the record. Well, probably things like that. But the point is, they may not be entirely full of it. Sylosis have for a while been the thinking man’s neck injury—too melodic for caveman, too complex for festival filler. And now they’re saying it’s the refined version. I approached it like a war correspondent in a land of chunky riffage.
And to their credit, it absolutely detonates.
‘Beneath The Surface’ is not so much an opener as the entity that bursts the doors off the hinges and sends the concept of a hinge itself up in flames. This is serrated Thrash Metal, with an injection of Melodic Death Metal itself, like At The Gates decided to get involved in CrossFit and have a crisis regarding trust. The production is mercifully untreated with the glossy sheen that seems to plague the bulk of modern metal and has consequently led most of the modern metallic subcommunity down the rabbit hole of being the background music for corporate fitness gyms. There is a distinct feeling that the guitars are working, a notion that in 2026 is like the claim of being an artisan.
‘Erased’ and ‘All Glory, No Valour’ are two songs that help reaffirm the initial assertion: riffs first, existential dread second. Middleton seems to have rediscovered his excitement for the teenage notion he mentioned earlier: that Metal must be unsafe, rather than the notion of a craft that is carefully brewed in limited batches specifically for streaming playlists such as Aggressive Focus. There is a malignant kind of enjoyment to the manner by which these songs go from accelerating thrash riffs to huge choruses. It is the Slipknot “People = Shit” philosophy, only with British restraint and the tinniness of Megadeth tablatures.
The middle section, ‘Lacerations’, ‘Mirror Mirror’, ‘Spared From The Guillotine’, is where their Progressive Metal heritage really shines through. The time signatures twist and change, and yet it never becomes too gratuitous or over-the-top in terms of fretwork. This is not Progressive Rock and Roll padding, LinkedIn-style. This is Progressive Rock and Roll padding, demolition expert-style. But what distinguishes The New Flesh from yet another exercise in technical virtuosity with an edge is the simple reality that Sylosis appears to have remembered, in one fleeting spark of genius, the five-letter word “songs” and the critical need to produce riffs that don’t bash the unwary consumer over the head with a flyswatter, but manage to lodge themselves firmly in their ears like overzealous earworms.
Then there’s ‘Everywhere At Once’, the emotional ambush. It’s a ballad about leaving the kids for a tour. It could have been mawkish sentimentality bordering on maudlin whining, it could have been some kind of metal band ballad antics about lighters and power chords and whatnot. But it’s like he’s been writing “woe is me” for the last decade or so and figured, hey, I’m the man, I’m gonna upgrade those to “woe is the world, and by the way, I’ve got to pack my bags for Germany or wherever-the-hell-it-is we’re going.” The man has kids, he’s leaving his kids for a tour, it’s the kind of uncomfortable reality that gives Metal some credibility, especially when it bothers to examine itself for once, rather than examining the dragons and whatnot.
Middleton, admitting he went from self-loathing to loathing everybody around him with “Fuck you, everybody!” is refreshingly honest, considering how this kind of music tries to coast on profundity through merely being extremely angry and quite loud. ‘Circle Of Swords’ succeeds at bringing this paranoid vehemence through, counting off of the reasons why Middleton is annoyed, rather than just being annoyed. The title track, meanwhile, takes the topic of death through the glorious body horror of Cronenberg’s films. “All hail the new flesh,” indeed! To Sylosis, it seems much more like the soul gym membership model: necessary, painful, and slightly humiliating. Death as release from the tedium of life? Blacker than generally gets made in Metal, especially all the wannabe Satan stuff.
And as for those streaming playlists Middleton Zeroes at, and judging by the albums those playlists feature, well-deservedly so, I think to myself that Middleton might be onto something here, because the amount of personality you can fit into one minute of an album is exponentially higher than the amount of personality you can fit into any number of algorithms-worth of average music. Middleton is, of course, spot-on in stating that, within a “genre landscape Deluxe has lovingly referred to as clogged with cookie cutter bullshit,” Sylosis is praiseworthily handmade… you can hear the hours of prayer in their songs.
Closer ‘Seeds In The River’ leaps out like something worthy of the term ‘epic’, something that might even inspire you to windmill away to it in your own living room and to subsequently apologize to your furniture. By its eventual conclusion, there remains an unmistakable feel to a band which has discovered what makes them tick and subsequently decided to stop apologizing for it. Not a single genre shift to be found here, nor any signs of frantic attempts to sound relevant to this or that recent release. Just artistic brutality honed to perfection.
What’s most impressive, though, is how the brutality and accessibility of The New Flesh never feel like they’re trying to prove anything to an algorithm. Is it their best? Well, who can say until time, tinnitus, and the sands of time have had their say? But it’s certainly their most complete – heavy, not heavy; emotional, not precious; progressive, not prog in the sense of vanishing up its own backside.
When the going gets tough, the tough get Metal. And heavier. And better. Not necessarily in that order. For their album “The New Flesh,” however, Sylosis’ stance in a tough world is not just to get heavier but to get sharper, angrier, and strangely more human. It is the sound of a mature band that would not rest its laurels on repetition; instead, it would mutate. Will it win the hearts of the unwashed masses? Will it cure Metal of its existential crisis? Not likely. But if you’re already inclined to indulge in this form of cathartic violence, then “The New Flesh” is a welcome addition to the genre, reminding us all that when the world gets crazier by the second, we should just turn everything up to eleven and see which one would break first—our speakers or our sanity.
All hail the new flesh. Just mind your neck.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Beneath The Surface
02. Erased
03. All Glory, No Valour
04. Lacerations
05. Mirror Mirror
06. Spared From The Guillotine
07. Adorn My Throne
08. The New Flesh
09. Everywhere At Once
10. Circle Of Swords
11. Seeds In The River
LINKS:
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