Envy have been masters at blending the harsh vitriolic energy of post-hardcore and screamo with the subtle ethereal softness of post-rock for almost two decades. Does the contrasting blend of styles sound familiar? It should. With just seven albums under their belt and a debut in 1998, Envy have been one of the most important screamo bands ever, and their influence and innovation remains understated to this day. Think of them like putting La Dispute, Mono and Converge in a room. Honestly what is difficult about making such a comparison is that most of those bands came after Envy.
Envy seem to be comfortable releasing albums every five years, with their previous two being 2010's Recitation and 2015's Atheist's Cornea, and the runtime clearly wants to make up for the lost time. Though very few songs really go over the six minutes mark, the songs always feel like they're moving and the whole thing does have a bit of a cohesive sound all throughout, in that the albums constantly pushes its two extremes together, sometimes at very contradicting times, like the vocals getting harsher as the instrumental gets more serene and likewise the other way around. This works to a great effect, but I feel it would've worked even better on an album a tad shorter and with some more focus on between-songs variation, not just within-songs variation.
Between the two, the balance is clearly tipped towards the beautiful here, with blistering post-rock tremolos that feel overwhelmingly blissful. In fact, quite the entire album feels overwhelming, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in an exhausting way. The album does offer some breathing grounds to these moments, sometimes with some ambiance, sometimes with some clean backing vocals, but the mix of Alcest-like shrieks with Mono-like instrumentals and La Dispute-like spoken word with Deafheaven-like vitriol really drives the energy of this record to new highs. The language barrier this will likely have with most people (it's a Japanese band after all, but they don't even offer subtitles) won't be a detriment to how much overwhelming emotion pours out of this album.
And honestly, if a band would put some excess everything on an album right now, I'd rather them be Envy.
