Album Review: Lost Forever, Lost Together by Architects

"‘Lost Forever, Lost Together’ is the sound of Architects finding and unleashing the buried treasure they’ve been searching for. " Seemingly forever battling metal’s everchanging current, Architects’ voyage to overcome the odds was put back on course with ’12’s ‘Daybreaker’, and album number six is their emphatic homecoming. Finding a new depth of brutality in the heaviest sections of their repertoire (‘Gravedigger’, ‘The Devil Is Near’) while flaunting intricate complexity within the epic, melodic soundscapes (‘Colony Collapse’), the Brighton four-piece have become the captains of their own emotionally-charged ship.

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Compromise is a word rarely mentioned in heavy music, at least not in a positive light, whether it be compromising integrity (read: the dreaded "selling out") or losing the aggressive side of a band's sound in favour of something more (gasp) melodic. However, in the case of Architects' sixth album, Lost Forever // Lost Together, compromise is exactly what the band needed.Following a journey through wishy-washy, soft post-hardcore territory two albums ago, the British band peppered its follow-up with forced heavy parts that didn't work that well, likely to appease disgruntled fans. Their latest finds them embracing the sweet middle ground between their early technical metalcore and their polarizing tamer side.

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Despite a mid-career misstep – 2011's somewhat anaemic The Here and Now – that threatened to derail their career, Brighton's premier metalcore crew are currently enjoying a huge surge in popularity that ensures that Lost Forever//Lost Together will deservedly be their most successful album to date. Exhibiting large amounts of the passion that has always enabled them to stand apart from an over-populated scene, Architects have toughened up in every department here and made a frequently brutal and complex album that belies metalcore's on-going stagnation. Songs like blistering opener Gravedigger and the joyously vicious CANCER boast plenty of the melodic hardcore sensibilities that may well be essential to their creators' upward commercial ascent, but there is no evidence of compromise within their thudding, muscular grooves and polyrhythmic punch.

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Though the label made their bones with driving punk rock, Epitaph continues to explore the brave new world of metalcore with an outing from Architects, who return with their first album for their new label, Lost Forever, Lost Together. While the U.K. band has always taken an accessible and melodic approach to the genre, their sixth album finds their sound taking a turn for the grandiose.

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