Album Review: Underneath by Code Orange

In recent years, as far as the alternative press is concerned, the future of challenging, heavy music appears to lie with the likes of grime, EDM and hip-hop. But Code Orange are here to prove that theory wrong, a truly aggressive band with an ironclad belief that the general public will enjoy their music if only they give themselves the chance. The only 'metal' act on this year's Coachella bill, they constantly engage with the world outside their scene, collaborating with boundary-pushing acts like JPEGMAFIA and Ghostmane and getting their music onto WWE.

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Code Orange pushed the worlds of metal, hardcore and rock festival sleaze through a perpetual hazing during their I Am King and Forever cycles. The Pittsburgh group established dominance, creativity and a not-to-be-fucked-with attitude, consistently rewriting the standards of their peers, and continually exceeding them with each release. Their following is more cult-like, but like it or not, all look to the "Thinners of the Herd" to affirm the next sonic trend.

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D espite its reputation as the satanic scourge of curtain-twitching suburbia, metal can be prone to the kind of squabbling you might see at a parish council meeting, with endless taxonomic arguments about whether something is death or thrash or black metal. Such petty bloviating is silenced by Grammy-nominated Pittsburgh quintet Code Orange, whose fourth album throws thrash, hardcore punk, math rock, sludge, metalcore, industrial, screamo, grunge, nu-metal and classic rock into a centrifuge, and produces something brand new and radioactively powerful. Lyricist and chief epiglottis-quiverer Jami Morgan roars about subjects that have long been fixations in metal, punk and emo - inauthenticity, disconnection, toxic relationships - and the withering chorus line of You and You Alone, "You play your part, you know your role!", is destined to be yelled by authority-resistant teens in arenas worldwide.

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