Boundaries have never been interested in fitting a mold, and their fourth full-length, and first for Sumerian Records, makes that clearer than ever. The Connecticut quintet, consisting of Matthew McDougal on vocals, Cory Emond and Cody DelVecchio on guitars, Nathan Calcagno on bass, and Tim Sullivan on drums, with DelVecchio, Calcagno, and Sullivan all contributing vocals as well, build Yearning: The Unbeautiful After as a full-scale sensory assault, stretching their sound to its breaking point and then reining it back in with moments of genuine melodic clarity. It's a record defined less by any single sonic signature than by the sheer intent behind it: a band determined to make heavy music that still feels dangerous, still feels like it has teeth, at a moment when the band themselves have said the genre risks losing exactly that. That sense of purpose runs through the album's writing credits as much as its sound. Most of the record was written by the band alone, with Drew Fulk brought in as a new production partner after years of working exclusively with Randy LeBoeuf, and Isaac Hale contributing to a single track. The shift in collaborators clearly mattered, as the band has talked about how Fulk was struck by their willingness to go as heavy and as soft as they do within the same record, refusing to settle into just one lane the way most bands in this space tend to.
That dichotomy announces itself immediately on opener "Malconscience," a title that essentially functions as a mission statement before a single lyric lands as an uncovered heart, free of vanity, staring straight at ugliness without flinching from it. The song sets a tone of contempt and reckoning that carries directly into "Skies Cast Amber Black," the album's first single and its clearest declaration of intent. Built on chugging, detuned riffing and a bridge that detonates from whispers into a full scream, the track channels real frustration with a heavy music scene that's grown bigger than ever while somehow making less room for anything genuinely new. It's an angry song, and deliberately so, as a band airing resentment rather than dressing it up. The middle stretch of the record shows just how far Boundaries are willing to stretch in the other direction. "May This Pain Never Leave" and "Torn Wide Open," the latter featuring Make Them Suffer, dig into grief and self-loathing with a rawness that borders on confessional, repeating the idea that pain itself might be the only proof that a life, or a connection, was ever real. "Bitter Ash, Bitter Love" and "Unequal Whole" keep circling that same emotional wreckage, pairing images of scorched, uneven horizons with lyrics about two people who were never built to survive each other intact. "Death Will Follow Me" pushes the tempo back into blast-beat territory, pairing rapid double bass with a call-and-response structure that turns the album's core question what do you actually want, and why do you want it into something closer to an interrogation than a lyric.
"The Leper's Bell" leans into isolation and shame almost literally, invoking the image of someone marked and set apart, begging to be let back in despite everything. "Crowned and Crucified," featuring Landon Tewers of The Plot in You, takes that isolation and turns it into something closer to devotion twisted by grief, framing love and loss as a kind of martyrdom neither party asked for. "Wasted Angel" keeps pulling at that same thread, wrestling with the gap between how someone is perceived and how hollow that image feels from the inside, landing on the idea that even gods and kings are just as plain and ashamed as anyone else underneath the performance. "Evidence of Extinction" and "Nothing, Gathered" push the record into its bleakest territory, circling ideas of desperation, erasure, and being forgotten entirely, before the penultimate track, "Only Endless," offers the album's most emotionally direct moment. Built on a clean vocal sinking into a queasy, seasick groove, the song doesn't interrogate the listener the way much of the record does; it simply states a feeling and lets it sit there, the ache of words that were never said and now never can be. As Matthew has explained, the track had to carry everything the album needed to say before the record could close.
That closing arrives with the title track, "Yearning: The Unbeautiful After," which functions as the record's thesis distilled into a single question: what happens after you've spent your time, your only truly finite resource, on the things you chose to chase? The song asks whether wanting something is ever really separate from being told to want it, and whether satisfaction is even available to people wired the way its narrator seems to be. It's a heavy way to end an album that's spent thirteen tracks refusing easy comfort, but it fits. Boundaries have made clear that this record was built to be a flag planted firmly in the ground, not a request for approval. Yearning: The Unbeautiful After succeeds because it never once feels like it's chasing anything outside itself. Boundaries sound like a band operating entirely on instinct, trusting that conviction alone is enough to make heavy music feel dangerous again, and on this record, it is.
This album is a masterpiece cover to cover, but I recommend that you start off by watching the music video for Only Endless:
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