Band:	Pupil Slicer
Album:	Blossom
Style:	Mathcore
Release date:	June 2023

01. Glaring Dark Of Night
02. Momentary Actuality
03. Departure In Solitude
04. Creating The Devil In Our Image
05. The Song At Creation's End
06. No Temple
07. Terminal Lucidity
08. Language Of The Stars
09. Dim Morning Light
10. Blossom

There's a mold one creates when being categorized as one subgenre. Pupil Slicer's debut Mirrors was quite unquestionably a mathcore album. So is Blossom for the most part, but it's one less interested in that mold. Rather it goes wherever the sound takes it.

Putting Blossom and Mirrors side by side might make it seem like I'm trying to discredit Mirror for not being as bold or as expansive as Blossom, which is not my intention. Mirrors was an album that was already showing signs of mold breaking, of wanting to introduce more elements of the kind that would eventually make it into Blossom, so it was already pretty expansive by itself. Yet, the mold is more present there. It is a mathcore album, and it's clear why that was the one direction that Pupil Slicer went to first and foremost, because they're just really good at this intricately rhythmic chaos with its heaviness making the riffs feel like slobs of concrete in free fall. I love Mirrors, and a lot of it is because I love The Dillinger Escape Plan and it scratched that itch.

Calling it more mature seems a bit like a cop out, like that's one of the most general ways you can state that a band's music is evolving, and maturation can only come with time. Like have you seen any band get more immature with time? Instead, I'd wanna do away with the maturity metric altogether. Blossom is bolder and more ambitious, and a lot of it comes with the mold breaking I already mentioned. The gist of it is still the mathcore sound that will likely remain the band's skeleton indefinitely, but there's a lot more injections of Deftones-ish alt metal, Deafheaven-ish blackgaze, post-rock, as well as taking the core sound, already intricate due to its mathcore origins, in some directions that seem more in line with progressive metalcore than the controlled chaos of the mathcore sound.

And that's just the genre play, the entire thing feels grander. On one side, the album itself it literally grander with about ten more minutes of runtime, and the average song length getting a tad bit higher too. But on the other side, the sound is grander, and aside from the sounds integrated, the way these are structured and how they flow from one another. This is most evident in the two longest songs, "The Song at Creation's End", whose post-rock intro reminds me of Mogwai before exploding into something akin to Envy's post-rock screamo, all of accentuated by some extra strings and pianos to create something that reminds me of So Hideous before bursting into actual moshpit worthy mathcore; and "Dim Morning Light" which sounds like what I'd imagine it would sound like if Boris tried to write a new Rolo Tomassi song.

Those are just a couple of examples, and I don't wanna downplay Pupil Slicer's own creativity by namedropping so many other bands. The most important thing is how little I felt the need to namedrop the same couple of artists I'd have namedropped for Mirrors, and how well Pupil Slicer integrate so many reference points into something cohesive and impactful.