Dark Divine – Undead Melody
Dark Divine – Undead Melody
Thriller Records
Release date: 29/05/26
Review by: Jon Deaux
7.5/10
I have yet to decide what form this half-point has taken. But I think I’ll find out at one of their Shallow Grave Tour dates.
First things first: Dark Divine has not recorded a perfect record here. Instead, they have recorded something far more fascinating – an imperfect record that does not appear to know it is imperfect in the least, and such confidence is a rarity in today’s highly polished metalcore releases in 2026. ‘Undead Melody’ is essentially the Victorian funeral procession that ends up in a mosh pit. You went to grieve. You stay to hurt yourself. Your neck may well require a visit to the chiropractor. But you’ll thank me.
Orlando, Florida is not usually thought of as a dark place. One thinks instead of theme parks, eternal sunshine, and the particular psychic torture induced by waiting on line for forty-five minutes to board something called “The Haunted Mansion Experience” while an overenthusiastic child in a Mickey Mouse hat eats a chocolate sundae right into your elbow. And yet, somehow. From this joyous, sunny, aggressively optimistic city, Dark Divine have managed to craft an album that evokes midnight in a town where there isn’t even midnight to evoke. Either Dark Divine are incredibly powerful individuals, or they need serious help. Both options, for this genre, are equally true.
Anthony Martinez kicks off proceedings in fine fashion on ‘Undead Melody,’ his vocals carrying all the haunting quality they need to carry and nothing else. It’s the rare case where a singer manages the real deal when it comes to haunted vocal work as opposed to simply performing hauntness. Such a distinction is what divides the Dark Divines from the thousands of inferior bands saturating the Spotify playlist system. Martinez is the former. You can tell the difference. It matters.
On ‘Midnight Masquerade,’ Edgar Allan Poe strikes a record deal, fires his cheerful publicist immediately, and then blows the whole lot on guitar pedals. The song is an absolute indulgence in its melodic ambition, and that is meant to be a positive assessment wrapped up in a slight insult. Such is the nature of this album. Robby Lynch’s work on guitar is worth mentioning and shall be done, because the riff that drives “Midnight Masquerade” carries with it a sense of sinister menace that is liable to compel you to reassess all of the decisions that brought you here. Not for dramatic reasons. Not for reasons of panic. But for the sort of reassessment that brings you to your kitchen at 2am with headphones and a very cold cup of tea, and a feeling of satisfaction that is slightly disturbing, which is great.
Then there is ‘Fading Away.’ What Dark Divine have managed to do is write a melodic metalcore song capable of vulnerability – something increasingly uncommon after irony took the genre hostage. Dark Divine are unembarrassedly sentimental at times, and that’s okay because they have built a musical world around their sincerity. It’s their greatest asset as a band, and this track proves it. It is devastating in its sincerity in a way that melodic metalcore once knew how to be before it decided that caring was aesthetically unsatisfactory. These people actually care, and the song makes that clear. When the crowd goes completely silent for Dark Divine, it means something different than when it is silent for others – Dark Divine will exploit the silence with a precision that few other bands know how to replicate.
‘Permanent’ and ‘Better Start Digging’ are the bruising back-to-back killers. Listening to them is like taking a punch followed immediately by the polite offer of some ice, because that’s exactly what Triston Blaize’s drums are here. Orlando drums that are polite and violent at once, played with such precision that it seems evident that the musician has planned every hit of the set in order to maximize their emotional effect. Musicianship or sociopathy? For the best drummers, it doesn’t matter. As for the bassist in Dark Divine…his name is Cory Scissorhands. Take that as gospel. His lines on ‘Permanent’ and ‘Better Start Digging’ give new meaning to bass as a foundation.
‘Sinfestation’ is not a word. Dark Divine invented it, and I’m choosing to believe it’s always existed and we simply didn’t notice because they’re that good. On this track, the band arrives in the middle of their record with the air of the guy who has waited outside a party for forty-five minutes and has decided he’s coming in, damn the consequences, and nobody stops him, least of all because nobody wants to. The riff is huge in that particular sense that good metalcore riffs always are – huge and wrong and heavy in a way that fills space in addition to filling volume. The hook is criminal. The title is a portmanteau that should not work and does. I resent it deeply. At some point in the middle of this song, Dark Divine shed all of their theatrics and narrative mythology and revealed what they are truly all about – a band not playing at being dark, but being dark. Not haunted actors, but people who truly live in a haunted house and have stopped commenting on the cold spots because the wine cellar has moved from the dining room to there.
‘Temporary Paradise’ serves as the album’s emotional pivot and its most contradictory track in many ways – a song about impermanence that continually calls the listener back. The composition is larger in scope here than previously, and Martinez executes something on the bridge of the song that must be heard in order to understand the sheer depth of the song and the emotional content of the artist. No, I’m not describing it clinically – describing something in clinical detail is the same as explaining a joke, and you wouldn’t do that would you?
Enter ‘Halloweentown II: Welcome Home’ and the full scope of Dark Divine’s mythology reveals itself. You cannot enter this track unprepared – it demands it. Its predecessor set up a world in a series of songs, something unusual in the metalcore landscape and more familiar in the rock genre, with the horror leanings that have historically built an aesthetic based on consistency and concept. “Welcome Home” is not just a revisitation of that world. It adds to the world-building with confidence and with the sense that the band members have spent time between albums working on a story and expanding on it. It doesn’t just feel like a sequel because it is one; it earns the sequeling status in an emotional and compositional way that few bands in this category manage. The Reapers’ minds may well have gone. Rightfully so.
The back half of Undead Melody is worth noting, particularly because it doesn’t fall apart at the seams despite the fact that this record is a monster to start with. ‘Freakshow’ is everything it should be. Gleeful, unhinged, and a little bit insane, the band clearly had so much fun writing and recording it, they decided to simply include it on the record. And why not? Happiness has been criminally overlooked in the genre. “Freakshow” is the product of four people who are very good at being dark, having a fantastic time being dark. There is far more complexity to that sentiment than you’d think.
‘Half Past Dead (Unbury Me)’ is the track with one of the most brilliantly constructed titles in rock music this decade – essentially an entire album’s worth of drama in a single stage direction and delivering on the implication with the track. It earns both halves of its name, which, if nothing else, deserves some recognition. ‘The Void’ emerges quietly after that – too quietly, in fact. Restraint on the final half of an album tends to pay off if there has been sufficient unrestraint on the first half of it. Dark Divine managed that nicely – the restraint here works. ‘Make Me Disappear’ rounds out that section of the album beautifully, offering up more emotional complexity in its inversion of desire (“wanting to disappear, writing a song about wanting to disappear and releasing said song to an audience that shouts the words back”) than the runtime might imply.
The album closes with ‘This Is Not The End (It Only Feels Like It)’ with the self-assurance of a band with absolutely no intention of ever ending anything. The title says it all; the track provides the proof. This is the product of a group who understands that the best closers aren’t necessarily closures, but the opening of a door left wide – the kind you walk back through because the room beyond is simply too intriguing to leave forever. Dark Divine walks back through. The Reapers follow. We eventually shall as well.
Across Undead Melody, Dark Divine have achieved something impossible by the sunlit standards of Orlando – something genuinely cold. Undead Melody delivers perfectly on its title, never being quite alive nor ever truly dead, existing in that peculiar grey zone that gothic melodic metalcore has always excelled at – melodic enough to be too good for the purists, heavy enough to not play on a certain radio station, but not nearly heavy enough to be entirely ignored. It is melodically precise, emotionally willing, lyrically dedicated to mythology and not mere mood, and dark enough to cast a shadow without disappearing into one. Dark Divine deserve their SiriusXM spins, their Outburn coverage, and all those festival slots. This is a band that knows what it’s doing.
Tracklist:
1. Undead Melody
2. Midnight Masquerade
3. Fading Away
4. Permanent
5. Better Start Digging
6. Sinfestation
7. Temporary Paradise
8. Halloweentown II
9. Freakshow
10. Half Past Dead (Unbury Me)
11. The Void
12. Make Me Disappear
13. This Is Not The End (It Only Feels Like It)
Social Media:
Facebook || Instagram || X || YouTube || TikTok || Spotify
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Jon Deaux and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
