The Acacia Strain - You Are Safe From God Here - review
The Acacia Strain - You Are Safe From God Here - review
Band
The Acacia Strain Release date
October 24, 2025 Tracklist
01. Eucharist I: Burnt Offering02. A Call Beyond
03. Swamp Mentality
04. The Machine That Bleeds [ft. Brody King & Colin Young]
05. Mourning Star
06. I Don’t Think You Are Going To Make It
07. Acolyte Of The One
08. Aeonian Wrath
09. Holy Moonlight
10. Sacred Relic
11. World Gone Cold
12. Eucharist II: Blood Loss [ft. Sunny Faris]
A review by
RaduP November 21, 2025
I think I'll always feel a bit unfit to write about The Acacia Strain, mostly because I discovered them pretty late in their career and I'm still baffled when I think that their first release was in 2002. There's plenty of bands that I'm discovering decades into their career, but somehow 2000s "core" bands are the ones I have the biggest issue properly gauging their place within the scene in a decade where it felt like the sound was at its heyday but I was completely allergic to it. I will never see Wormwood as anything but a historical artifact. When I discovered The Acacia Strain and with every release since then, I never got the feeling that this is a band with decades of history. There's something about how they continue to operate that feels too fresh for them to be this far from recent.
Arriving at You Are Safe From God Here, I'm also at difficulty for not really knowing how to frame the review. It's not my surprising first contact with the band, nor is it a dividing of their sound into sibling albums. For all intents and purposes, it is just a new The Acacia Strain record. So was Slow Decay, the only album from the band released since discovering them that I haven't reviewed. Because I didn't know how to frame it.
But then again, despite the lack of a proper "gimmick" or selling point, this has had me more excited than Slow Decay did, despite that being my first actually anticipated The Acacia Strain record, and I think a huge part of it is that the band re-merging the two sides of their sound after surgically splitting the apart and focusing on them on Step Into The Light and Failure Will Follow allowed them to make the synergy between the two more powerful. Despite most of the songs being close to the 2 minute range (with just one exception), it somehow works for the slower downtempo sludgier songs to not take up more runtime than songs focused more on the hardcore side of things.
Features have been a consistently exciting and entertaining part of The Acacia Strain, and that's a tradition that is upkept here. God's Hate contributes two vocalists to "The Machine That Bleeds", which lead me to find out that Chris Jericho isn't the only wrestler to front a metal band, since one of them is Brody King (I swear I'm gonna start watching AEW soon). Though that is an addition more in line with hardcore, as opposed to Blackwater Holylight's Allison Faris contributing clean vocals to the exception-to-the-short-song-rule closer "Eucharist II: Blood Loss", one whose slower paces goes even further into doom and sludge than the other slower songs on the record, and Faris' vocals do a lot of the heavy lifting of making that song stand out sonically.
You Are Safe From God Here does not exactly reinvent the wheel or signal a new direction for the band or do anything but do more of the sound that The Acacia Strain have been perfecting, but it's within this "perfecting" that this album amazes me, and a huge part of that is because this is a band that's more than two decades removed from their debut. If only more bands felt this vital at this point in their career.
Comments
Comments:
5
Visited by
53 users
|
Posts: 1821  |
Posts: 1821 Quote: DON’T
---- Need a break from headbanging? Restore your street cred by visiting my hip-hop list! Tha Swagnum Opus: A Selection Of Hip-Hop For The Curious Metalhead
Loading...
|
 Posts: 9626 |
Posts: 9626 Written by A Real Mönkey on 21.11.2025 at 22:23 Elaborate. I've seen the cagematch.net ratings for some of those Will Ospreay, Bryan Danielson, Adam Page, or Kenny Omega matches and I can't not be curious but I'm currently still catching up on just WWF/WWE stuff.
---- Do you think if the heart keeps on shrinking One day there will be no heart at all?
Loading...
|
|
Posts: 1821 |
Posts: 1821 Written by RaduP on 21.11.2025 at 22:29 I might be a bit biased since ive been an NXT fan since practically day one (They won the battle but we won the war), but the recent downward spiral of AEW has been some of the wildest shit I ever seen, late WCW level bad. Tony Khan can’t book worth shit, and his obsession and one-sided rivalry with WWE shows in the matches. Great matches ruined by shit endings, pvps loaded with 14 inconsequential matches over 6 hours long, invincible Jon Moxley, the list goes on. Year 0 AEW was very good, if overblown with tribalism. But once Cody bailed and Tony Khan and the Young Bucks turned it into their own little toybox, it went to shit real fast. Absolutely check out some of the early stuff, but i would stop there. Even WWE is doing way better story and match wise. For the wrestlers you mentioned if you want some great matches, check NJPW or GCW. /end rant
---- Need a break from headbanging? Restore your street cred by visiting my hip-hop list! Tha Swagnum Opus: A Selection Of Hip-Hop For The Curious Metalhead
Loading...
|
| Posts: 9626 |
Posts: 9626 Written by A Real Mönkey on 21.11.2025 at 23:32 Next on the list
---- Do you think if the heart keeps on shrinking One day there will be no heart at all?
Loading...
|
|
Posts: 1821 |
Posts: 1821 Written by RaduP on 22.11.2025 at 09:06 Definitely some of the best wrestling you’ll find even if you can’t follow the stories. Check out some Joshi wrestling as well like Stardom, TJPW, Ice Ribbon, Sendai Girls, ect. Anyway I really like this album.
---- Need a break from headbanging? Restore your street cred by visiting my hip-hop list! Tha Swagnum Opus: A Selection Of Hip-Hop For The Curious Metalhead
Loading...
|
Hits total: 609 | This month: 10