Album Review: Architects - 'For Those That Wish To Exist'
Brighton bred behemoths Architects are back with their ninth studio album, a sprawling affair with a litany of guests and bonus features which makes this their most ambitious work to date.
For Those That Wish To Exist sees the metalcore titans undergo a metamorphosis of sorts. While 2016’s All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us was oppressively dark and desolate, and 2018’s Holy Hell was mournfully, brutally cathartic, this latest offering seems a little more eclectic. That’s not to say the album’s any lighter than previous offerings — perhaps the odd song is tinged more towards radio accessibility than a mosh pit’s wall of death, sure, but the album is still distinctively Architects — but more that the album is a maelstrom of influences and styles that blend seamlessly into one cathartic whole.
Even just the singles show a band changed by their experiences. Take Animals, for instance, released at the tail end of October. Opening with a whispered, reversed chant and transitioning into soft, layered vocals and slow, ominously pounding drums, the song has a distinct feel of industrial metal to it. The song feels like a macabre sermon, and you the zealous acolyte. It may not be the first song called Animals, but its indisputably one of the best. Contrast that with the most recent single, Meteors, a song fuelled by almost pop sensibilities and certainly the most accessible and radio friendly song the typically brutal band have released. It’s frantic pacing belies a complexity that snatches its landing through keen lyricism and the now repeated motif of ecocentric nihilism.
Or, failing that, the atmospheric and almost cinematic Dead Butterflies, debuted in their universally praised Royal Albert Hall show streamed in November and received with such open armed adoration that it simply had to be released; with frequent lyrical references to the vivid Memento Mori, it’s at once hauntingly beautiful and bleakly optimistic.
For any of the more traditional Architects fans, bemoaning the band’s slow retreat from their earlier hedonistic heaviness, fear not — the album has a fair few moments of fury. It might not live up to some of the band’s earlier discography, but there’s no reason for that to necessarily be a bad thing. In the politically outraged Discourse is Dead, the band make their anger heard over thunderous drums and electronic tinged instrumentals that seem as almost a descendent of 2016’s A Match Made in Heaven, while early single Black Lungs sees the band experiment with the traditional metalcore formula while continuing some of the more overarching themes of Holy Hell. It’s in Libertine, though, that the band best seamlessly blend heaviness with their version of calm. A slow intro of deep, ominous bass leads straight into some signature Sam screaming, his harsh vocals coming beautifully to the fore. Yet it’s the moments where the harsh vocals disappear that makes the song. Sam’s harmoniously soft vocals give the song a deeper significance than simply one to head bang along to; it creates a discourse between these two personas as it were, with the song traversing the two seamlessly. For a song about self destructive tendencies, both personally and in terms of humanity as a whole, the band get it spot on. Between this and a lack of some of the usual suspects — no pitched screams or breakdowns, for instance — give the song a unique identity and a sense of vitriolic beauty.
Of course, it’s impossible to talk about the album without commenting on the remarkable features. Winston McCall is as distinctively, beautifully guttural as ever in Impermanence, coming in at the tail end of a song remarking on the brief mortality of a humanity fighting against the darkness. They contrast brilliantly with the slow paced screams of Sam, with scorn dripping off of every word and guttural growl a-plenty. The transition from Winston’s vitriolic feature back into a choir-laden chorus is in and of itself phenomenal, the rest of the track notwithstanding. The only criticism with the song would be the lack of vocal duality between the two distinct voices; a missed opportunity, perhaps, having Sam’s remarkable high pitched screams over Winston’s, but one perhaps impossible given everything going on.
Meanwhile Little Wonder is perhaps the most out of place song on the record; featuring Royal Blood’s Mike Kerr, the track seems closer to a Royal Blood track featuring Sam than the other way around, oozing a glistening ‘80s vibe and voices dripping with slick polish. Yet a marriage between the two bands seems to have been a long time coming, and the result is a unique and catchy hard rock tune that comes as an abrupt surprise.
Yet it’s Goliath, with Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil, that’s the most shocking standout. Opening with shredding guitars straight out of Daybreaker — think a slightly less piercing Alpha Omega — the song on its own merit is tremendous. The fade out of the bridge, leaving just a infrasound-esque bass and nigh indiscernible vocals, creates a moment of dissonance and dread before Sam’s screams fill the void, and a midway transition gives the song an industrial feel, rounded out by what resembles a warning alarm heralding Neil’s distinct vocals.
And then he stops singing, and he starts screaming. Very bloody impressively, over pulsating drums and a thunderous breakdown. You have to wonder whether Architects themselves expected it, with how abrupt it is.
Contrasting the heavy is, of course, the light, and no track is lighter than mid-album stunner Flight Without Feathers. The first thing to remark on is that it comes in at a strange point in the album, interjected between Impermanence and Little Wonder. That alone gives the song an almost eye-of-the-storm feel; an album pit stop, as it were. Synth led, languishing and melancholy, with ethereal, almost other-worldly vocals which are intermittently distorted and echoed to add to the feeling of weightlessness and bewilderment that the track exudes. Yet, for all of this, it’s genuinely moving. Dark and melancholy, it seems to reflect a band saying goodbye and letting go. ‘Nothing left of me/ don’t forget to breathe’ Sam seems to exhale in a breath of surrender, a defeated mantra, while elsewhere seeming to remark that sometimes belief isn’t enough. Despite the afore mentioned strange placing, contrasted as it is with Impermanence, it provides a much needed moment of clarity and self-reflection — it reminds you of the significance of the songs beyond the confines of what heavy music is.
Following on from this is Demi God, one of the final tracks. The track starts simply, with some audio of some studio sounds that inject a sense of meta-levity into what could otherwise be brutally, violently deep. The actual song is almost oppressively atmospheric; from the outset, soaring guitars give the song a celestial vibe to match the ambitious title, while elsewhere a bridge of high vocals over piano and violins allows the song to ascend while a slow souring of strings leaning on harmonic minor as drums start to kick in give the song the human part of demi-God; a more distinct show of ecocentric destruction than anything else the band has produced, as the ethereal strings are corrupted. The end, with electronic vocals that appear almost puzzles interspersed over the soft piano, is simply polishing off a phenomenal track, if a very unique one.
Finally, then, is Dying is Absolutely Safe. As well as competing for one of the best song titles of the year, with its optimistically sardonic feel, the track follows in the footsteps of previous album closers. The acoustic guitar intro and soaring string section gives the song a heartwrenching beauty that provides the perfect backdrop for the forlornly designed vocals of Sam scattered over the top. Noticeably, the track seems to reference much of the band’s back catalogue, with lines such as ‘beggars be blessed’, ‘distant blue’ — the similarly emotional closer for 2014’s Lost Forever/ Lost Together — and ‘death is not my enemy’. It’s this final line that becomes truly impactful. The orchestral swelling that kicks in immediately after seems an exact mirroring of the opening for Death is Not Defeat, one of the most heartbreaking tracks from 2018’s Holy Hell, directly concerned with the tragic passing of Tom Searle. In this way it seems an almost logical conclusion — almost closing the chapter, reflecting Dan’s comment that the album is a ‘new chapter’ for the band.
As Sam says, ‘sometimes you feel reasons to be positive. Sometimes you don’t.’ And in reflecting this, the album becomes something tremendous. It’s blisteringly raw, teetering between crushing hopelessness or paralysing defeatism and revitalised determination, and it’s a credit to the band that they can still create something so impactful in the light of everything that they’ve gone through and everything that’s been taken out of them already.
‘The title speaks to those people who want to live in a better world, who want to make a difference’ asserts Searle. ‘For anyone who thinks that creating a world that we can live in, and that our children can live in, and our children’s children... this is for you’.
Words by James O’Sullivan