Cycle Of Suffering

Masters of enlightened, neck-wrecking turbo-thrash, Sylosis is returning to the barricades after four years of silence, armed with it's strongest album yet and a renewed sense of purpose. The fightback against the dying of the light starts here. Formed in Reading at the turn of the millennium, Sylosis swiftly stood apart from everything else that was happening in the British metal scene at that time. As the metalcore hordes began to dominate the mainstream, guitarist and chief songwriter Josh Middleton pursued a singular, defiant course, blending the machine-gun precision of thrash with the monstrous power of modern extremity and frequent flashes of progressive flair. "Cycle Of Suffering", the band's fifth album, is immediately recognisable as the most vital and explosive record yet to be released under the Sylosis name. While still bearing many of the band's expected sonic hallmarks, the likes of I Sever and Shield take a subtly ingenious approach to state-of-the-art thrash metal, infusing everything with a sense of perpetual invention and untrammelled intensity. There are huge melodies and gleaming hooks erupting throughout this sustained, 50-minute burst of cutting-edge brutality, but "Cycle Of Suffering" is bold and exploratory too: everything from slow-burning cautionary tale Calcified to the acoustic-led but venomous Arms Like A Noose indicates that Sylosis has evolved as a band, while it's leader's song writing blade has never been sharper. "Cycle Of Suffering" simply the best thing that Sylosis has ever produced.