This is increasingly looking like deathcore’s year. With stellar releases from WHITECHAPEL and SHADOW OF INTENT, and forthcoming crushers from LORNA SHORE and DESPISED ICON (amongst others),the subgenre that was once widely mocked for its initial descent into cliché has become more powerful than ever.

SIGNS OF THE SWARM have battled their way to the top of the heap through sheer persistence and dedication. After releasing a fairly low-key debut album in 2016, the Pittsburgh quintet have spent most of the last decade marching onwards and upwards, with a series of records that have never been less than impactful. From their 2017 Unique Leader debut “The Disfigurement of Existence”, through to the eccentric, glitchy “Absolvere” (2021) and the grim and gruesome “Amongst The Low & Empty”, they have established themselves as one of the scene’s most inventive and characterful bands. Brimming with bug-eyed hostility from noisy start to bloody finish, “To Rid Myself of Truth” may prove to be their most significant statement to date. It is certainly their heaviest.

For proof that SIGNS OF THE SWARM are serious heavyweights, just look at who they have recruited as special guests. Both LORNA SHORE‘s much-loved frontman Will RamosandWHITECHAPEL‘s certified deathcore guru Phil Bozeman lend their caustic pipes to songs here: telling endorsements from the biggest names in the game. One of the few vocalists with the chops to rival those icons, SIGNS‘ David Simonich puts in a formidable performance throughout “To Rid Myself of Truth”, holds his own against Ramos and Bozeman, and nails these songs to the wall with absolute brutality. Coupled with his band’s reliably inventive riffing and mutant arrangements, their sixth full-length swiftly becomes a straightforward masterclass in state-of-the-art deathcore.

From the very start, this is a malevolent assault on the senses. The opening title track is an overwhelming squall of mid-tempo savagery, interwoven dissonance and frantic, bullying momentum, with Simonich‘s animalistic screams bringing drama to the disgust. Recent single “Hellmustfearme” is even more terrifying: a thick, abrasive bolt of controlled chaos, with an audible desire to drive moshpits to madness, pitiless blastbeats that dig in like fishhooks, and a hulking, lurching gait that knows only violence. Those who decried deathcore’s lack of depth and anticipated its rapid demise a decade ago are now looking very silly indeed.

This is an album of songs that wrench the genre’s usual tropes in jolting, unsavory directions. “Natural Selection” is an ingenious deconstruction of deathcore’s basic tenets, with more unholy noise and crippling distortion than seems strictly fair. “Scars Upon Scars” is as sordid and sore as its title suggests, an atypical loping groove bearing the weight of Simonich‘s seething soliloquys. Will Ramos adds his puke-powered screech to the genuinely unhinged “Clouded Retinas”; Phil Bozeman sounds ripe to chew his own head off on the scabby militancy of “Iron Sacrament”; and “Fear & Judgement” dips an incautious toe into more hardcore-flavored waters, with 156/SILENCE man Jack Murray and PRISON‘s Johnny Crowder tag-teaming Simonich like elite veterans on a day trip. From front to back, “To Rid Myself of Truth” is an object lesson in how to pummel everyone and everything into a fractured, blood-drenched pulp, and the closing “Creator” is the sinew-snapping apex of SIGNS OF THE SWARM‘s core mission. Gut-wrenching and sick to the broken, back teeth, this is exactly what most of us signed up for. Hellishly heavy but oddly refined, this is modern heavy music forced to a sanity-threatening breaking point, belched out with unstoppable bravado. The truth hurts, and this fucking stings.