Band:	The Acacia Strain
Album:	It Comes In Waves
Style:	Deathcore, Metalcore
Release date:	December 26, 2019
A review by:	RaduP

01. Our
02. Only
03. Sin
04. Was
05. Giving
06. Them
07. Names

And as it seems to be the case for each year, in the very last days, an album comes along that just turns your whole world around. Not only do The Acacia Strain have no business sounding this good, but I never thought my last 2019 review would be of such an album.

I was never that much of a metalcore fan, so I'm only recently getting into all those older core bands like As I Lay Dying or Bring Me The Horizon, but in my head I still can't really tell them apart. Before I reviewed Fit For An Autopsy, I didn't know they were a different band from Annotations Of An Autopsy. I also was confused to find that The Acacia Strain is a different band from The Amity Affliction. So perhaps I'm not the best person to review this album, because I also first listened to The Acacia Strain through that The Depression Sessions split with Thy Art Is Murder and Fit For An Autopsy, which was actually somewhat of a turning point towards me warming up to deathcore, and if a band was on that split, that was quite a seal of approval.

So now we get to It Comes In Waves, which arrived on the 26th of December, so I almost didn't even listen to it. I did, and I knew this one had to be my last 2019 review. This is something else. Exploring their back catalog was pretty good, but honestly nothing they did comes too close to this. Like I said, they have no business being this good at this point in their career, considering their debut was in 2002. I could pinpoint roots of this sound to their previous release, but this is the only The Acacia Strain release I found that really takes the deathcore sound this far into doom and sludge.

You heard that right. The only thing this reminds me of is Black Tongue, which also brought deathcore to its absolute slowest and heaviest, but The Acacia Strain do more that just play slow and tune down, a lot of the influence going close to post-metal (at points Gojira-ish as well) atmospheres and sounding absolutely monolithic, sometimes almost cavernous much more than just brutal. Though don't get me wrong, this is still a core album, so besides the sludge atmospheres, you'll find chuggy riffs, breakdowns, gang vocals and the whole bunch. The sound does jump a bit between the two but still manages to create a cohesive sound that carries across all throughout. I've seen this refereed to as an EP and as an album, mostly because of its short length and unitary almost one-track-like flow. I mean, the song titles kinda spell out a single song title in themselves, so this one is definitely one that works best as a whole.

The music here feels really well thought out, a lot of emphasis on both having compelling atmospheres as well as having some really thick bass, without compromising that much of their "core" sound. So much so that this could appeal both to core fans and post fans. Not only is this a highlight of their career, it might even be a highlight of the decade.