Darkest Hour – Suffer Divine
Release Date: 30th October 2026
Label: MNRK Heavy
Bandcamp
Genre: Metalcore
FFO: Killswitch Engage, Unearth, August Burns Red.
Review By: Jeff Finch
The number of bands I have in my (still growing) physical media collection is staggering, and upon looking at them and alphabetizing, there are a lot of core bands, a sign that even though some groups are so ‘meh’ it’s hard to not decry the entire subgenre; a great many of them aren’t. Today’s band Darkest Hour falls unequivocally in the latter category; this is their eleventh album and yet nowhere does it seem the band has remotely lost their touch or slowed down.
What the band brings, in a scene utterly rife with bands that can be called “metalcore,” is obvious care for their fans and themselves, as they fall in the August Burns Red category of never releasing a bad album. Darkest Hour instead brings emotive riffs and solos, the ability to effortlessly transition from near thrash to opening a song with a two-minute guitar performance worthy of the stage, and everything in between. Take The Unforgiving Hand, for example, a song that opens with a short acoustic passage transforming into a clean, grandiose composition, a lengthy guitar solo that screams “instrumental track” within the chord progressions, ripped straight from a ballad, the building tension such that you just know it’s going to lead into some ridiculous shredding to finalize the solo. But no, they don’t do that here; instead, they introduce the rest of the band in a far less dramatic and aggressive manner than one could expect, the rest of the song at half tempo, with less intensity in the music showcasing the anguish in the vocals. It’s a brilliant track compositionally and one of the highlights of the second half of the album.
The first half, on the other hand, is straight up Darkest Hour metalcore thrash, fierce riffs with a strong melodic core trading blows with percussion that can only be described as ferocious without being blast-beat-driven, perfectly complementing the vocals and guitars in a cohesive wall of sonic annihilation. It’s the ABR approach: smash them equally from all angles, and, for the vast majority, that’s exactly what we get from the second we hit play. BUT there are sadly some very “miss” moments in the track Salvation, namely the chorus, which tries its absolute best to utterly destroy the track, in spite of wicked guitars and a restrained percussion section that sees a lot of off-tempo smashing of the snare. Smash, four guitar notes, smash. They rely on this deceptively simple snare-and-riff pattern, but each snare hit lands with enough force to keep the track relentlessly intense without ever needing to accelerate. Which brings us back to the chorus, not only the worst part of the song, but genuinely a low point of the album as a whole. It’s this hybrid clean singing that’s kind of shouted that sounds so forced that the good will provided by the music is damn near deleted with every utterance. It is a more than questionable decision that thankfully stays within this track only, an absolute banger otherwise.
Speaking of bangers, the band saved quite literally the best for last, the epic, aptly titled 7-minute spectacle that is A Story of Redemption. Featuring some of the most technical guitar on the album, frenetic in all the right ways, sonically very near the closers of some epic metal ballads of the past, the guitar work ropes us in with its creativity, lead shredder Nico Santora and Mike Schleibaum combining to create some of the cleanest, tightest, intricate, melodic riffs and licks the band have produced. The pummeling percussion, not wanting to be outdone, reaches a fever pitch with some incredibly powerful double bass, the rhythmic weight really ramming home that the band is firing on all cylinders and maybe even more. The vocals are absolutely feral, with raw, anguished screams that somehow retain an underlying melodic quality, adding another layer of emotional intensity to the already crushing guitars and the drums ready to take flight. It’s everything that makes the band excellent rolled into one singular 7-minute masterpiece. There is no better way the band could have ended this album, of that I am certain.
One somewhat major anomaly isn’t enough to bring the album down; if anything, it might be a track that just has to be skipped, a shame considering. But taken as a whole, Suffer Divine is another in a career full of superb musical endeavours, one that any fan will instantly gravitate towards, and one that a newbie could just put on to see what they’re all about.
(4.5 / 5)
