Album Review: As Everything Unfolds - 'Did You Ask To Be Set Free?'
“Saying goodbye is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.” So says Charlie Rolfe, the lead vocalist of As Everything Unfolds, as ‘GASOLINE’ allows their new album to take its first real, shuddering breath around five minutes in. In mid-2024, the band, riding high after Ultraviolet and support runs with Enter Shikari & Bury Tomorrow (more on them later) were brought crashing down to earth by the unexpected death of drummer Jamie Gower. His presence is thankfully all over the record; they were mid-way through making it a reality when tragedy struck, and faced the loss head on, completing it with an eventual 11 songs making the cut.
Two years later, the quartet—Rolfe, Adam Kerr (guitar), George Hunt (bass) and filled out by Jon Cassidy on keys and synths—have signed to Century Media with their most ambitious work in hand, not to mention their most relentless. The listener should take those moments of pause where they come, because once ‘DENIAL’ allows ‘DID YOU ASK TO BE SET FREE?’ to spark into life, there’s little in the way of breathing room. Along the way, bold experimentation is the record’s calling card, with last year’s sharp left turn ‘SET IN FLOW’ slotting neatly into context as just one example of AEU stepping well outside their comfort zone, opting for focus on texture and dynamics than a typical song structure, its stuttering chorus and drum-and-bass heft signalling that the band were loathe to repeat themselves this time.
Continuous refinement, on the other hand, rears its head in other places: the jagged riff that drives ‘POINT OF VIEW’ should be a real crowd-pleaser in a live setting, while ‘FIND ANOTHER WAY’ places pop sensibility front and centre, a prime example of the band’s blending of accessibility and heaviness, both musical and lyrical. They’ve outgrown their own expectations of what this project should be (“escaping the confines is oh so freeing”, per ‘BREAK IT AWAY’, folding in unexpected influences and adapting them to their ever-expanding universe. A sprinkling of breakbeats here, a helping of brutality there… it’s quite the developed recipe at this point, and they’re working with some surprising ingredients, such as roping in Dani Winter-Bates of UK modern metal luminaries Bury Tomorrow for a bruising guest feature on ‘WHAT YOU WANTED’.
We mentioned them earlier, and that collaboration came about as naturally as anything, starting with a text sent Dani’s way after their late 2024 tour together. The result is an absolute crusher, taking lyrical inspiration from The Shining and musical cues from Bury Tomorrow themselves, doing justice to the feature and then some. Similar face-melting heaviness is found immediately thereafter on ‘IDOLS’, and it’s a punishing one-two which takes the album’s relentless streak to new heights, before the comparatively serene ‘REVERIE’ (a genuine surprise the band could only pull off right now) and ‘EDGE OF FOREVER’ take things in a more overtly melancholic direction.
Closer ‘SETTING SUN’ is steeped in grief, written for their departed drummer and directly concerning his tragic passing. It’s gutting yet undeniably cathartic, an ideal tribute which had to be made to provide any sense of closure. There’s an alternate timeline where the grief-stricken band hangs it up in the wake of that loss. It would have been completely understandable, but As Everything Unfolds hit a wall and instead barrelled through it with everything they had. They are firmly on the way up, leaving behind their metalcore trappings for cross-genre experimentalism, feeling the fear and doing it anyway on an album it must have been unbearably hard to complete. DID YOU ASK TO BE SET FREE? draws a tear-stained line in the sand; and the result is, fittingly enough, true liberation, as the band settles into the best version of themselves. Where they head from here is anyone’s guess, but you’re damn right they’ve done Jamie Gower proud.
Words by Gareth O'Malley
