Band:	Candy
Album:	It's Inside You
Style:	Hardcore
Release date:	June 2024

01. eXistenZ
02. Short-Circuit
03. You Will Never Get Me
04. It's Inside You
05. Love Like Snow
06. Dehumanize Me
07. Faith 91
08. Terror Management
09. Dreams Less Sweet
10. Silent Collapse
11. Dancing To The Infinite Beat
12. Hypercore

Candy find new electronic genres to inject into their hardcore mix.

When I first covered Candy I was more surprised by how their band name is being used for a hardcore band. Granted searching for "Candy" does lead to a shitload of pop artists, but for a band on a metal website, I would've at least expected something like glam metal. But now that I have encountered Candy and I know their deal, that name/music contrast got swept under the rug. What replaced it was curiosity about how the band would follow up Heaven Is Here, the album I reviewed. With their previous works having been more in the usual metallic hardcore style, Heaven Is Here stood out for making the noisiest hardcore punk record I've heard, by literally using power electronics as a backdrop for the entire record.

Heaven Is Here though relied a lot on that gimmick, and even if I appreciated it a lot for it and for the hardcore that was within it, there was too much of it that felt like hardcore punk with static ran over it, and that's something that's not going to be as big of a surprise the second time around. Between trying to make that mix work even better again and reinventing themselves again, I'm glad Candy the latter. It's Inside You is still quite a noisy album, but this time in a more conventional "dense with distortion" way rather than much in terms of actual noise injections. Instead the focus this time is on the actual metallic hardcore, and one can tell that the core of it is hard-hitting and versatile enough in how it's executed, with the slower breakdowns and the fast pummeling blast-beats-filled both working well.

But what is stylistically and texturally interesting this time around is that the noise injections have been replaced by multiple other electronica injections, mostly of the electro-industrial and breakcore variety. Less of a constant layer and more of an occasional flourish. In itself a pretty common thing nowadays, with plenty of glitchy electronica to be found in hardcore recently, but less so in this more beatdown metallic hardcore style, and all the electronica/industrial/alternative flourishes take second place to the core sound, but they still take over some songs, like in the final two tracks. It's also the first Candy album to actually feel like an actual full-length album, even if punk generally has shorter runtime standards for calling something a full-length, with Good To Feel's 18 minutes and Heaven Is Here's 30 minutes actually being 20 minutes + a 10 minute ambient song, so having more than 30 minutes of actual metalcore/hardcore with whatever flourishes feels like a change of pace, and especially when they manage to keep being engaging all throughout the runtime.

It's Inside You might be less stylistically unique than Heaven Is Here was, but the blends are more seamless and engaging this time around, while also making the core sound feel more impactful.