Forbidden – Forbidden
Forbidden – Forbidden
BLKIIBLK
Release date: 23/10/26
Review by Jon Deaux
8/10
They let us sweat sixteen whole years until a child was ready to grow and resent your company. People who were in tears when listening to “Twisted Into Form” have since lost the hair they once had, their families have disintegrated, and their joints have become problematic, and here comes their payoff.
Forbidden have died more times than any band has lived. Over the course of four decades, the Bay Area icons have broken up, faded away, reconfigured their band roster, and been written off by everyone but the owners of Forbidden Evil and Twisted Into Form, two thrash albums that were so great that no band has even come close to achieving anything similar since. In 2023, Forbidden returned from beneath the earth with a new lineup and an attitude that had spent time with death itself and been disappointed in what it had witnessed. They are not prolific musicians; they only make music when there is something worthy of saying, a risky way for any band with a forty-year absentee problem to operate.
Craig Locicero, the last bastion standing as only a founding member could, has been holding back on this album with the finesse of a man who fully knows the contents of his basement. And it lives up to expectations in spades. “Distortion” and “Green” are fine, and “Omega Wave” was a real treat for me, the same way that an all-clear from the doctors is a treat. “Forbidden” blows all three out of the water. Anyone loving the first two masterpieces will have their sphincters loosened right quick.
The past album is already nearly sixteen years gone, and Locicero has never been as good as he sounds now. For a band with such a history of brushes with death as this one has, that’s no mean achievement indeed. Locicero reunites with his bass player Matt Camacho, adds guitarist Jeremy Von Epp, drums Chris Kontos, who has played with Machine Head and Attitude Adjustment. knows about the scars from his work with those bands, and vocalist Norman Skinner. Hiring a vocalist who replaces the founder of the band looks like an effort that will most certainly lead nowhere, yet Skinner manages to make his position into something supernatural. Skinner is like a ghost, one that has come to heckle Death because he does not mind dying anymore. Von Epp and Kontos both respect the heritage of their band and drive it toward new heights, heights it has never seen before; Locicero and Camacho do what they always have been doing, thrashing until the end of days. With their track record, that’s no empty threat.
Without the music, it does not mean much at all, but the music itself is terrible. Zack Ohren produced the album, and he somehow cannot produce a cheap-sounding disc. Everything about the album feels like a big box of money dropped from a high place. This is probably the most progressive and ambitious album by this band ever released, and it has more to offer than any other band has achieved throughout its career, or even during a comeback. The singles “Divided By Zero,” “Psyclops” and “Burning The Lungs Of Earth” must have blown your head off.
Each one takes the original style of the band and gives it a new life infused with turbocharged prog, as if giving new life to ancient bones. “Mutually Assured Dysfunction” is the most abrasive track of the lot, six minutes of elaborate violence that couldn’t care less about your nostalgia and wouldn’t mind burying it. “Single Point Failure” is the opener and brings to the forefront the elaborate complexity of “Twisted Into Form” and the rudeness of its melody. “DCLXVI” is a seven-minute journey into the careful dreadfulness that combines a little bit of Nevermore and a voice by Skinner that will haunt you forever. “Sycophantasy” is short, vicious, and gets a guest appearance by Brann Dailor of Mastodon, singing like an angel at a crime scene. “The Burden” has no boundaries when it comes to piling up riffs and melodies, and “Sol Grave” gives us a taste of what forty years of thrash without any limitations can give us.
“Flower of Life,” on the other hand, is a sprawling progressive epic that draws more melodies from Locicero’s songwriting than ever could be expected.
But if all of this seems too much, you obviously haven’t listened to the album yet. It is a revival that deserves all the hype that death has given it, and it is one of the finest thrash metal albums from the last two decades and perhaps beyond. All the nostalgia will prevent most fans from admitting it, but “Forbidden” is surely the greatest record of their career, and they had to die a few times for that.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Single Point Failure
02. Burning The Lungs of Earth
03. Divided By Zero
04. DCLXVI
05. Psyclops
06. Jisei
07. Mutually Assured Dysfunction
08. Sycophantasy
09. The Burden
10. Sol Grave
11. Flower of Life (Chaos By Design)
LINKS:
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