Band:	Harm's Way
Album:	Common Suffering
Style:	Hardcore, Sludge metal
Release date:	September 29, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Silent Wolf
02. Denial
03. Hollow Cry
04. Devour
05. Undertow [feat. King Woman]
06. Heaven's Call
07. Cyanide
08. Terrorizer
09. Sadist Guilt
10. Wanderer

Dropping the apostrophe in the band name on the album cover for some reason isn't indicative of Harm's Way dropping any fundamental part of their sound. This is still dense metallic hardcore. But not just that.

Before the "Harm's Way running man to various songs" Facebook page popularized Harm's Way to a whole crowd of internet dwellers, mostly off the back of just how towering of a hulk vocalist James Pligge is, Harm's Way were mostly known for how huge their hardcore sound is. Well, calling it just hardcore punk or even metallic hardcore or metalcore or whatever is reductive to understand the nuances and the sound evolution. Starting out more powerviolence inspired on the early EPs, they only really came into their own with the sludge inspired Isolation in 2011, and then spicing things up with some industrial touches on 2015's Rust. 2018's Posthuman didn't reinvent anything in the formula but refined all the changes in sound from past albums to make something where the metallic side in the metallic hardcore sound was very prominent.

Now coming off the largest gap in between releases at five years, here we have Common Suffering, and there's still no huge deviations from the formula that worked for the band, but it's still far from being a carbon copy of Posthuman. The quickest way to put it is that it continues to emphasize the metallic side the same way that Posthuman did, perhaps even more so, while the metalcore vocals and some of the chugging riffs keep it grounded in hardcore. And that still serves as the core of what Harm's Way do, and that coupled with the 34 minutes runtime, would've made an album that still wouldn't overstay its welcome. Thankfully, there are things added to that skeleton, and a lot of it comes from the metallic side emphasizing both heaviness and atmosphere. Maybe the sludge in their sound takes cues from both post-hardcore and post-metal to create a layer of extra oomph to the atmosphere, or maybe it's the slight industrial touches that show up in some interlude-like moments as well as in some of the mechanical riffing and drumming that sporadically appears.

The post/industrial part of the sound gives a fair share of variation, one that already seemed to favor slower paces but works in even slower ones now (see "Terrorizer"), but the biggest left turn comes in the guest spot of King Woman's Kristina Esfandiari, which blends a more mellow side that weaves pretty seamlessly with the atmospheric heaviness of the record, even if that's not the last time that clean vocals make their way unto the record (see "Wanderer"). There's some dissonance in some of the riffing, especially on the front side of the record which also contributes to it sounding even less straight-forwardly punk, and that somehow leaves me wanting a bit more in terms of some higher pace moments on a record that feels more concerned with sounding towering and menacing. And indeed, there's somewhat of a very pummeling grandiosity to the sound here, as well as some pace variation, something that creates a sort of divide in half in the record where the faster paced punk moments appearing more in the first half and the slower atmospheric moments having a bigger share in the latter half.

So what results is a huge chunk of angry metallic hardcore that takes the "metallic" side so seriously it ends up swallowing the entire thing in atmospheric heaviness.