Highwire Magazine

Hot off their 20th-anniversary tour in Europe Silverstein are back with their first new album in three years.

We may have had a live album and a best-of album in that time to tide us over, but quite frankly it’s not been enough. So it was all good news for fans that the band will be releasing their ninth studio album A Beautiful Place To Drown on March 6. From the first glance at the tracklisting, it is easy to tell this is going to be a diverse offering as it features Aaron Marshall (Intervals), Aaron Gillespie (Underoath), Caleb Shomo (Beartooth), Princess Nokia, and Pierre Bouvier (Simple Plan).

The Ontario quintet has managed to pull one of the best albums of the year so far out of their hats. If it also happens to be one of their best albums so far, career-wise, it’s hard to say, as there are plenty of great ones to choose from. What can be said for certain is that on this album they push themselves both lyrically and musically exploring subject matters that range from personal demons to those that relate to society as a whole.

The album opens with ‘Bad Habits’ and it is reminiscent of a lot of the songs off of the last record Dead Reflection. This track features Aaron Marshall of Intervals. A high point of the song is the shredding solo that leaves you wanting more… which we get in the way of ‘Burn It Down’. The song was the first to have been released and so it’s somewhat familiar to die-hard fans who are bound to enjoy the verse by Beartooth’s Caleb Shomo. It has one hell of a catchy hook that will leave you singing along.

The album progresses on from there nicely with one banger after the other but the real gems are the collaborations. Princess Nokia’s featured track ‘Madness’ is brilliant and has recently been released to good reception despite the somewhat odd pairing of artists. The actually very heavy track has a lot of Told screaming and it has a breakdown that is a real treat, possibly the best moment of the album. It’s through collaborations like these that the band blend the old with the new almost seamlessly.

The band want us to know A Beautiful Place To Drown balances an intensely dynamic mix of melody and aggression, rooted in the energy of hardcore punk and emo with their growth as songwriters. From the outside, we can see that It’s a challenge to find that balance in keeping their old sound consistent for their longtime fans and mix it with their new influences. When talking about the new album vocalist Shane Told said, “we have so many fans that have been with us from the beginning and have grown up with us, but at the same time we have new people that come on board with each album,” and he continued with, “so we really do try to find a way to please the people who have been with us from the start while also having some modern aspect to what we do.”

A Beautiful Place To Drown ticks all those boxes, seamlessly merging the band’s long term strengths with an audacious approach to composition and production. As a whole, it blends vibrant contemporary sonics with walls of distorted guitars and thrashing drums to create a unique sound. This is definitely an album you should get your hands-on when it comes out and you’ll want to listen to it again and again. The excellent performances of these tracks that are bound to follow on any promotional tour of the album are well worth thinking about and fans will be living in anticipation for them.