A brief period of torrential rain had just swept across the entire grounds of the Vans Warped Tour in Orlando, Florida; being rushed into the massive hall in the centre, everyone began to wonder whether the day would come to a rather abrupt and unwanted end. However, after the sun appeared once again, everyone eagerly returned to their respective stages, and Architects began to play their unfortunately interrupted set once again. I was instantly hit by their immense energy, and lead vocalist Sam Carters ability to captivate and direct the crowd into a tireless swarm of vigorous anger and moshing. Listening to their new album, ‘Lost Forever // Lost Together’, reminded me of this penetrating force the band so easily depicted. This being their sixth studio album, after being recorded from September to October of 2013, will be released March 11th 2014.
The first single released off the album was ‘Naysayer’ in January of 2014, and debuted well in the UK Rock Charts at number 3, and in the UK Independent Charts at number 26. With a very Architects-sound to the song, we hear a mixture of dark melodies, contrasted with the tenacious guitars and vocals. The second single to be released was ‘Broken Cross’, which was introduced by a slightly ambient sound, quickly interrupted by Carters vocals, screaming “God only knows why we were born to burn”, followed by an unyielding drop of the heavily-distorted, relentless guitars and drums. This single is much heavier than ‘Naysayer’, and presents a much more guitar-heavy production style.
The album seemingly portrays, as Carter himself stated, a “real end-of-the-world sound in places” – this apocalyptic atmosphere is especially evident in the song ‘Gravedigger’, which features Carters fittingly tortured-sounding vocals, amongst a range of heavy riffs to accompany. Additionally, the song ‘Castles In The Air’, a personal favourite of mine, also adheres to this ominous sound, and is primarily intensively heavy throughout, however featuring oddly melodic, clean guitar fragments, interspersed with the tormented screams of carter.
With a change of tone, the song ‘Red Hypergiant’ is considerably slower than previous songs on the album, featuring much more of an ambient, harmonious sound. There is a slightly electronic nature to the beginning of the song, accompanied by a dark sample, which leads to the slightly distorted, perhaps ironically euphoric sounding lead guitar.
One pitfall the band gets seemingly drawn into is the repetitive sounding nature of the album; there is, arguably, not that much variation in sounds. Perhaps this is due to Carters lack of stretch in his vocals; however, there is no doubt that the album is fairly repetitive. Although this may be evident, this should not put a fan of the metalcore band off – the album is still worth giving a listen to as a body of work in its entirety. With all that has been said, my personal favourites of the album are ‘C.A.N.C.E.R.’, ‘Castles In The Air’, ‘Dead Man Talking’ and ‘The Distant Blue’.