Superstardom has been beckoning Lorna Shore for years. All it took was striking the perfect balance. Stumbling onto frontman Will Ramos after a decade of spinning their wheels, not only had the New Jersey mainstays unearthed the ideal vocalist for their maximalist brand of symphonic deathcore, they’d joined forces with a personality capable of hauling them from metal’s nerdy outer reaches to the heights of the heavy mainstream. Likewise, motormouthed Will gained a musical foundation so unapologetically OTT that he needed to hold nothing back. Viral 2021 breakout To The Hellfire lit the fuse. 2022’s Pain Remains cemented a blistering rep. Three years on, they’re fully ready to claim the throne.
In the truest sense, I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me feels like a culmination. Simply getting gnarlier was never really an option for such renowned purveyors of shrieking pig squeals and guttural belching. Any hint of conventional clean-sung ‘listenability’ was anathema. Instead, they’ve set about fine-tuning and supercharging, ramping up the bloodcurdling theatricality and mining deeper and deeper from the inky darkness within.
Seven-minute opener Prison Of Flesh – the lyrics to which offered up that menacing album title – lays out the stall spectacularly: 75 seconds of pulsating percussion eventually slingshotting onto a rollercoaster ride full of gnashing vocals, knotty guitar solos and Wagnerian operatic flourishes.
Oblivion is even bigger and bolder, taking the listener on a nightmarish post-apocalyptic odyssey through scorched cityscapes into the very heart of darkness. Ironically, In Darkness itself offers the first shards of light with choral vocals and soaring six-strings, before Unbreakable launches its bloodthirsty, adrenaline-spiking assault, sort of like latter-day Parkway Drive if someone peeled off all their skin.
