Band:	Leeched
Album:	To Dull The Blades Of Your Abuse
Style:	Grindcore, Metalcore
Release date:	January 31, 2020
A review by:	RaduP

01. The Hound's Jaw
02. The Grey Tide
03. I, Flatline
04. Now It Ends
05. Earth And Ash
06. Famine At The Gates
07. Praise Your Blades
08. Burn With Me
09. Let Me Die
10. Black Sun Ceremony

I hope you like your metalcore as abrasive as possible.

Leeched are a hardcore band from Manchester, UK and they play heavy music if you couldn't tell. With just one more album and EP under their belt, all of them with the same cover art aesthetic and a depressive affirmation as an album title, Leeched already climbed towards the top of the UK underground hardcore scene, and not so many bands manage to do that with just their debut. And now we find how To Dull The Blades Of Your Abuse takes it from there.

What made and still makes Leeched very interesting is how well they manage to combine an emotional charge with the incredibly heavy. This doesn't really go into emo or screamo territories, but there are feeling of anger and depression that clearly reek, as if that wasn't clear just from the album title. There's a lot more to this aggressive energy and they make sure that you feel it and they, no matter how inhuman their music is, still feel like humans. And what a better host for all that pent up anger than some of the most abrasive industrial hardcore out there. Seriously, To Dull The Blades Of Your Abuse has one of the most uncomfortably loud and suffocating mixes, which normally isn't something I'd really appreciate, but they work so well with that feeling of nausea and discomfort.

The music is definitely uncompromising, from the aforementioned mixing, to it not ever having any breathing moments, to the pummeling industrial touches, to the constant need to throw riff after riff and breakdown after breakdown and blast beat after blast beat. In regards to the latter point, throughout the 36 minutes runtime of the album, it never feels like they're threading too much on a single note, always on the lookout for new ways to pummel the listener. Most of the album is really fast, but it also excels in integrating mid and slow-paced moments, like the "Now It Ends" and "Let Me Die". Which is why I enjoy the mix so much in regards to how they also work towards achieving a sense of ghoulish atmosphere. Everything about the music feels inhuman. Everything about the music feels human.

I'm not really sure if Leeched didn't go a bit too hard for their own good on this one. But it's clear why they manage to captivate this much attention so soon and why it works so well. It's not enough to just make incredibly abrasive metalcore. You gotta put your soul into it. And they do.