British metalcore survivors Shields make their boundary-pushing return with bold and occasionally brilliant new album Death & Connection.
Shields are a band with a hell of a story to tell. Emerging from the British metalcore underground back at the beginning of the 2010s, their striking combination of devastating deathcore and sparky stylistic verve showed the potential for a Bring Me The Horizon-style evolution into metal’s big leagues. Unfortunately, they were derailed emotionally and logistically by the death of guitarist George Christie in 2018 and split in the aftermath. Piecing themselves back together over recent years – founding vocalist Joe Edwards and guitarist Samuel Kubrick Finney now joined by drummer Alastair Wain and bassist Krishan Pujara – Death & Connection marks an intriguing second chapter.
Listeners coming in cold will be blindsided by the languid four-and-a-half minutes of spoken poetry and sparse, John Carpenter-influenced synths of outstanding opener This Is Not A Dream. Layered in shadow and dripping with melancholia, it’s a great song in its own right, but even more so stacked against the furious deathcore assault of Abuser. Melding industrial and accessible alt. metal, Kill twists the knife again, then Parasites metamorphoses into something like latter-day Enter Shikari.
Stitching together not just a broad spectrum of styles but also an ever-shifting outpouring of emotion – grief, catharsis, existential dread, hope – there isn’t a whole lot of fluidity here, but neither is there space for boredom. Guest spots from Graphic Nature’s Harvey Freeman (Lacerate), Left To Suffer’s Taylor Barber (Wolfskin) and Samuel’s dad Jonathan Finney (the grandstanding title-track) add another textural dimension. And as much as heavy threads of nostalgia are woven throughout the record’s tale of love, loss and living on, there’s real cutting edge and shimmering modernity about compositions as audaciously planned and executed as Womb and Loser.
Final track Miss Me is arguably the boldest moment of the lot. A beautifully dreamy rumination on the immediate shock that accompanies death and the far longer lasting space in our lives the ones we love leave behind, its silky progression from bendy acoustic guitars to strident stadium rock is an almighty place to leave off: defences down, hearts bared. It’s unclear where exactly Shields will go from here, but on this evidence you can be sure it’ll be on their own unbroken terms.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: While She Sleeps, Loathe, Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes
Death & Connection is released on January 30 via Long Branch
