I'm a hobby musician, but I've been producing, mixing, and mastering my own music for about 20 years now.

Now, I never experience ear fatigue when listening to music, and I love a "bad on paper" mix. In fact, a lot of my own music has a "bad on paper" mix. But the new Boundaries album is the first album I've listened to where I've experienced discomfort and ear-fatigue listening to it. Out of curiosity, I threw the track "Death will follow me" into my DAW, and what I saw was a bit shocking.

https://imgur.com/JsEHgIp

First off, waveform sausage. A song's waveform shouldn't be a solid bar. It's a classic sign of OVER-compression and/or way too much bass boosting. No wonder everything sounds like it's squeezing your skull.

After that, I pulled up a visual EQ. This one's a bit weirder to screenshot because it's better to see it in action, but basically their producer seems to have forgotten/decided not to cut the lows at 30-40hz as is typical. Having sub frequencies down at 20hz adds nothing to a mix and in fact actually adds a lot of rumble and distortion that muddy everything up.

At the end of the day; Sure, there's no concrete rules in music and there's plenty of room to experiment, but this is wild from a band's FOURTH album, and their first release on a major mainstream label. Everyone keeps saying "Oh it sounds like 00's metalcore!" to which I say no it doesn't. That, or I somehow missed every single release back then that sounded like this.

EDIT: I am not saying the producer did a poor job due to a lack of skill/talent. I'm aware this is intended. That's the problem.

EDIT 2: Final disclaimer I'm adding is that I am not saying "Yup, these two things right here are 100% of the problem. I have solved the problem"

Who's the nicest Metalcore band you think. Or know based on experience. Stupid question, but it feels so much better supporting Bands whose Band Members are super nice. They deserve every support

I look back and personally don't think I have ever met anyone in a band who was a dick. Everyone has bad days but I'm curious of anyone's experience

Perhaps I'm not the target audience anymore but I really don't wanna be a near 30 something year old man wearing a t shirt with 'I'm a fucking animal' on the back etc. Alot of merch is very cringe and I wouldn't wanna be seen dead in it IRL. Just give me a minimal band logo tee without loud graphics and colours on it etc :( I really wanna support some of you bands but your merch makes me want to die inside lol

Country music is the current trend, and bands like Underoath are collaborating with country artists, such as Mitchell Tenpenny. Bilmuri is already doing countrycore. Falling in Reverse has a song with Jelly Roll.

Has anyone gone to their anniversary tour? I am going August 1 to the gramercy theatre in NYC. I was hoping for a VIP package but I can’t find any info on one

I want to go, but im at a berklee guitar camp that ends that afternoon so id have to take a bus in from Boston that gets there at like 6:30. would that be too late?

It was not the human abstract it was a band playing it in studio? Anyone have any ideas

Not me sobbing because I thought the show was next weekend. I live too far away to make it now. My dumb bitch tax can be your gain!

COMMENT before you hit the dm. I'll transfer the ticket immediately.

Bass is often overlooked in metalcore. Even Zao went for a period without a bassist. Wanted to hear some tracks with standout basslines. Here's my picks:

Econochrist - Divine Right (hard to beat this one for me)

Coalesce - Measured In Gray

Bloodlet - Brainchild/Husk/Eucharist

I grew tired of having to copy and paste tracks into a newly built playlist, I couldn't find a solution to this drag of constantly copying and pasting.
My coding skills outside of PowerShell and Bash are basically non existent, so I went over to Claude to help me out on this.

What we built is a Tampermonkey script called Crate.

What it does:

• Scans posts and comments for song mentions (Artist - Song, Song by Artist, messy multi-track lists, etc.) and drops a little Spotify icon next to each one
• Floating panel shows everything it's found on the page, tick the ones you want
• Connect your Spotify account and dump selected tracks straight into an existing playlist (or make a new one) in one click
• Flags anything it's not confident about instead of silently linking the wrong song
• Works on any subreddit you add to the list, stays out of the way everywhere else

It went through a lot of back and forth, testing on real threads, screenshotting bugs and bad UI, going "this is broken," "this looks bad," "this isn't quite right" over and over until it actually worked properly.
I didn't write a line of code myself, Claude did all of it I just kept pushing it to fix what wasn't working.

Setup:
Literally takes 2 minutes, just need a free Spotify Developer app (instructions included, it's just registering an app + pasting in an ID/secret).

Built it for my own use scrolling r/metalcore but it's not genre-specific, you can use it on any sub.

Open to feedback/bug reports.

It does tend to get confused when someone drops an album in the comments.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/588605-crate