Band:	Eyes
Album:	Congratulations
Style:	Metalcore, Noise rock
Release date:	February 03, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Generation L
02. It’s Happening
03. Congratulations!
04. Dull Boy
05. Value
06. Tearjerker
07. Bbbbbbbliss
08. Chew
09. The City
10. Ballast

Metalcore and noise rock aren't often paired together. They should be.

Those are definitely not the only two genres on Congratulations, and because of how thin the line between some subgenres are, those two might not even the two main genres in the blend of sounds present here. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Here we have Danish punk band Eyes, usually written in all caps like all cool bands. They haven't been around for that long, and have only released three albums so far. Their guitarist also plays bass in LLNN. There's actually a lot of common DNA between the bands that I would get into more if I was musclassia, but considering that last year he urged us to come see LLNN while me and the rest of the Roadburn boys had lunch I will not do that (I still caught like 10 minutes of their set and it ripped).

Metalcore is the part of their sound that is the more ambiguously defined here. Eyes were much more of an unambiguously metalcore band on their self-titled debut back in 2018, so I guess part of the reason why I still generally use that term with them is due to the sound lineage from that album, even if it got diluted alongside the other nuances of heavy punk metal sounds they now approach. Some of them were present from as far back as their debut, in a more diminished form, but 2020's Underperformer put more emphasis on mathcore and post-hardcore alongside it. And yet both of them still feel like more straight-forward records compared to Congratulations. There's obviously the noise rock I mentioned, but because of how that is already close to other genres, you can find some sludge metal and even some blackened sludge moments.

Combining the intricate mathcore of The Dillinger Escape Plan with some noisy metalcore in the vein of Colonial Wound, and also the more straight-forwardly hardcore noise rock of Unsane, the more extreme side of post-hardcore from Portrayal Of Guilt, some almost djenty chugs in the intricacy to remind of Meshuggah, the huge guitar bass tones of a post-metal sludge monster in their LLNN colleagues, some The Callous Daoboys tongue-in-cheekness, a dash of Daughters and Idles insanity, and just a pinch of blackened hardcore a la Hexis. And you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Eyes' Congratulations. Sure, some metal injections a metal album do not make, so Congratulations still very comfortably sits in the punk zone, and even within the punk zone you'll find a bunch of albums more extreme than it, but there is something that makes the cauldron of sounds here so jovially devastating.

Few bands can make chaos sound so catchy. A bit spastic and undecided on a single sound, but a lot of Congratulations' appeal comes exactly from that.