Album Review: Chelsea Grin - 'Eternal Nightmare'

Britain's tattoo shops just got eleven new songs to add to their playlists.

I absolutely adore getting tattooed. I love everything about it from the pain, to the art becoming apart of you for life, to the grungy vibes you get from the surprisingly clean attic, that your tattooist works in. If you have ever been tattooed you will know that as soon as you walk in you are met by a wall of strong smelling ink and heavy music. Let’s focus on the latter, in the form of CHELSEA GRIN’s new album Eternal Nightmare.

Before I start sounding like the worst infomercial you’ve heard in eight years, let's talk about the album. It starts as it means to go on with a gorgeous harmony of angry shouting and emotion. ‘Dead Rose’ is the perfect pace setter for the album as the song gives a good old fashioned smack to the face, with the second song ‘The Wolf’ continuing the beating but this time bringing a baseball bat in the shape of mega drops and ear drum bursting guitars. ‘Across The Earth’ starts with a slow piano, giving you a chance to catch your breath before re-entering Beatdown Boulevard and counting the overall theme of the album. At this point of the album, whilst listening to ‘See You Soon’ and ‘930 am’ that my neck started to hurt from all head banigng I was doing alone in my room, like the cool kid I am.

This is where we get to the highlights of the record with ‘Limbs’ and ‘Hostage’ with ‘Cent of Evil’ acting as a great middle man between the two. Both ‘Limbs’ and ‘Hostage’ provide the bare knuckle brawler style, which is ‘Eternal Nightmare’. ‘Limbs’ provides the ultimate mosh pit starter with constant naughty little drops throughout which I’m pretty sure is gonna make some people leave with more than just a black eye from their live shows. Where as ‘Hostage’ starts off with an epic thunderstorm of guitar and does not once slow down the pace, it’s as if Chelsea Grin whacked their equipment against a charged amp and said “that’s the sound we want” and it’s beautiful. From here we move into ‘Nobody Listened’ which has great head bangable lyrics but it slowly morphs into a song of more shoulder shimmies than head bangs with a colossus funky beat, that you can’t help but dance to. Finally we reach the last songs of this hurricane of an album with ‘Outliers’ and title track ‘Eternal Nightmare’. This album decided to end how it started with more walls of screamo joy and dirty drops and it leaves you wanting more and more.

Overall the album is a tattoo shop’s dream and I mean that in best way possible. It’s raw brutality rips your face off, chucks it against a wall and defecates on it and that's exactly what you want from a deathcore band. 

Words by Alfie Drake

Eternal Nightmare is out now via Rise Records