Fit For An Autopsy’s fourth album, and second full-length with vocalist Joe Badolato, doesn’t come out of the gate swinging furiously. It comes out slogging, a hulking creature dragging its knuckles through mud and grime, knowing it can take its time. Because you can’t run. You’re frozen in fear.

And it’s going to get you.

The Great Collapse isn’t the soundtrack to a horror movie. It is a horror movie. It is our horror movie. United in the theme that everything around us is falling apart, from our societies and our governments to our personal psychoses and indeed the very earth upon which we stand, these nine tracks may very well be the nine signs that signal the apocalypse.

Building both sonically and thematically off of 2015’s Absolute Hope Absolute Hell (eOne), Fit For An Autopsy continue to evolve beyond their Deathcore trappings into something much more complete and expansive. Yes, there are still plenty of moments that will make you feel like the band is curb stomping your face over and over again, but the interplay between those and the emotive melodic moments are more expressive this time around.

Of course, the opposing forces of the quiet and the crushing only serve to make the violently heavy moments that much more powerful. Take ‘Empty Still’, where doomy verses, reminiscent of old-school My Dying Bride, trade uppercuts with the massive mid-paced stomp we’ve all come to know and love from this band. Or ‘When the Bulbs Burn Out’, a dynamic nightmare that will make those of weaker heart want to sleep with the lights on.

And what is more terrifying than one Joe Badolato shouting in your face? A whole choir of Joe Badolatos shouting in your face! Album highlight ‘Black Mammoth’, inspired by the Dakota Pipeline protests, boasts a majestic and powerful, almost anthemic chorus, the type you might expect to hear in Valhalla when Amon Amarth is off on a piss break.

If the end of the world is going to sound anything like The Great Collapse, bring it on.

8.0/10

JASON KOROLENKO