Metal
Fearless Records · 9 October 2026
The title track does what an opener has to do and then adds something nobody ordered. The guitars are tuned a long way down and doubled, Briton Bond’s unclean voice stays in the mid range and Cody Quistad’s clean one, which on other records climbs as high as it likes, is held back so as not to fall out of step with the tempo. The detail is the choir of voices that turns up just before the breakdown: a near-liturgical finish bolted onto blast beats and bottom-end chug, and it works.
The two singers have stopped waiting for each other. “Silk” plays out with no clean vocal at all, on thick low-tuned riffing, and misses nothing; “Figure 8” does the opposite and leaves Quistad alone from start to finish, breakdown included, which is precisely where Bond used to arrive. In between, “Red Dot” puts a guitar solo exactly where the genre demands a breakdown. Quistad, the band’s rhythm guitarist, produced it, and it is the first time they have produced themselves.
The problem with “Landfall” is the itinerary. Two of the thirteen tracks, “Blindfold” and “Song Of The Swamp”, had already come out on the EP “It Calls Me By Name” on 17 April this year, and both sit in the second half, with “Song Of The Swamp” acting as the penultimate climax. So the album meant to be their statement for the year arrives with a sixth of it already out, and the high point of the closing stretch is familiar material. In a year with two releases, the recycling sits exactly where it shows most.
The rest holds up unevenly. “Stay With Me” and “Silence Has Spoken” drop the pressure to let Quistad sing, “Way Of Pain” and “God Complex” settle into a single percussive riff that carries a whole track without moving much, and “Silhouette” closes on a spoken ballad that grows into radio rock. This is the sixth album by a band from Ocala who have kept refining the same formula without leaving it alone, and the formula works here; what fails is serving it twice in one year with the same songs inside.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Roger Estivill