Before I even start, I just want to say that I have never listened to any screamo or metalcore before this. I found “The Black” by Asking Alexandria on the newly released section of Spotify and figured that something I had never heard of would be better to listen to than Ariana Grande, but that’s for another story. I kept an inner monologue the whole time I was listening, and here are some of the highlights.

“Their singing voices aren’t that bad but the guitar has two volumes: extra loud and can’t-hear-anything-else loud.”

In the majority of tracks on this album, I had to either devote all of my focus to matching the lyrics page I had pulled up to the few words I could actually hear, or I had to give up on understanding anything other than different pitches of yelling. While the guitar part was intricate, after the first thirty seconds of the first song, it felt old, unoriginal and obtrusive. Every once in awhile something new would happen with the guitar, but my hopes of something legitimately different would quickly pass, falling back into the blob of riffs and loudness that is this album.

“Wait, what, soft piano part?”

There were a few songs on the album that were fairly musically mellow, something I found to be a necessary repose from the sheer intensity of the rest of the record. The music was thought out in those few tracks, and was usually fairly diverse, with everything from soft guitar parts (which I honestly didn’t think was possible for them) to violins to nothing more than a piano. At that point, I had had enough of the music, and my attention turned to the lyrics.

“We get it already, you’ve said that enough.”

No matter what the tone of the track was, soft or extremely heavy, the lyrics were entirely unoriginal and repetitive. There were a few good lines, approximately two in the whole album, but the majority of the lyrics sounded like someone gave Fall Out Boy an extra desire for revenge, an even greater ability to hold grudges, and the addresses of their exes. One noteworthy example: “You’re going down, you’re on your own, this hate is endless.”

“What’s going on? What is the point of this?”

Asking Alexandria tried to get creative with the intros to a few songs, having band members talk about I-don’t-even-know-what for about 15 seconds, then cutting straight into heavy guitar. Whatever it was they were going for, it didn’t work. It created confusion, nothing more.

“I’m not even going to question the message of this anymore.”

This is simply personal preference, but when a guy spends 40 minutes screaming about all of the horrible things he wants to do to his ex-girlfriend to torture her, I get a little bit concerned about that girl. The majority of the songs focus on how this guy is going to make his ex’s life a living hell, and that’s not something I want to listen to, that’s crossed the line of “angry breakup songs” into the territory of “you’re a stalker and it’s creeping me out.” It wouldn’t seem so bad, I don’t think, if it wasn’t the focus of the majority of the album, but rather a minor feature.

“Is this the end?”

In total, this album is something I would thoroughly enjoy never listening to again in my life. There was no depth to it and every track with a similar mood sounded the same. The music was mediocre, the vocals were unoriginal and unintelligible, and the overall sound of this album is unremarkable.

The Pathfinder gives “The Black” a 4.0/10.