Any time I’m looking for a shot of straight adrenaline to get the juices flowin’ there’s few bands I’ll turn to more regularly than Every Time I Die. Their 2007 album The Big Dirty is a personal favorite of mine (“We’rewolf” being the best song in their entire discography in my opinion), but despite that nostalgic gravitational pull of Southern Metal glory from my early 20’s, it’s hard for me to objectively state that their final album together Radical isn’t their best. Maybe it’s the abrupt way they broke up in the middle of a tour in the winter of 2022 that adds a piece of sentimentality to this album, or how the absolute howitzer of “Dark Distance” kicks off this album with a desperate appeal to send the plagues and floods in a brutally Old Testament sort of way that immediately puts you on the edge of your seat, or perhaps it’s simply just the fact that the band is operating with the grizzled experience of 20 years together as a band blended with a distilled dose of piss and vinegar that is as pungent and as volatile as it ever was that makes Radical great.
Whatever it is, this album absolutely shreds. And these dudes are straight up missed. Long live ETID.
Standout Songs: “Dark Distance”, “Planet Shit”, “A Colossal Wreck”, “Thing With Feathers”
