If you are hungry for gut busting drums and face melting guitar solos, a few songs in All That Remains’ fourth album will satisfy your needs. However, do not expect all the tracks to be on the harder side of death metal. As expected, the opener “Before the Damned” starts off with heavy guitars and intensive vocals. Then, the following track “Two Weeks” may make some of you re-check whether or not you purchased the right album. Yes, “Two Weeks” is surprisingly a melodic song. Don’t get me wrong, the track still has great guitar riffs and drums, but I just want to point out that there is neither grunt nor scream but only clean vocals. I personally like the track, but I could almost imagine rolling eyes from their hardcore fans. Lyrics and singing style of “Forever In Your Hands” are like coming from an emo group. The rest of the album is mainly dominated by ATR’s trademark deep and fast tunes, but it is hard to ignore lighter sounds (for metalcore standard) like the acoustic intro in “A Song for the Hopeless” as well as the closing power ballad “Believe in Nothing”, a Nevermore cover.

Vocalist Philip Labonte proves once again that he can quickly interchange between screaming, grunting, growling and singing. Labonte sings his heart out, but Oli Herbert’s guitar solos and duels with the drums throughout the album are undoubtedly the main attractions. Hearing the guitar chords speeding up after a short cool down in tracks such as “Chiron” and “Relinquish” is very exciting. The new drummer Jason Costa is also impressive, and sometimes the relentless beat of his drums gets the spotlight.

In this album All That Remains include both expected and unexpected sounds. The heavy guitar riffs, hyper-intense drums, and grunting vocals are combined with some softer materials. As a result, this album may not totally please all the old fans, but certainly will pick up new fans. However, if you can’t stand melodic tracks with clean vocals by a metalcore band, then you may want to avoid this CD. If you don't mind though, by all means, pick this one up.