Music Review: Wage War's Landfall Review: The Band's Heaviest Album Yet

On Friday, October 9th, Florida based Wage War released their highly anticipated sixth full length studio album, Landfall. Shortly following the April release of the It Calls Me By Name EP featuring the crushing “Song of the Swamp”, the metalcore outfit started teasing new music sending their fans into a frenzy. The resulting album is most likely their heaviest, and best, release to-date. 

The title track features searing guitars, intense vocals, and a bass groove that sets the tone for the rest of the album. Like a lot of recent metalcore albums, “Sweet Dreams” takes aim at the consumer driven, capitalistic nature of corporations with hard hitting lyrics such as, “Make sure you’re safe and scared/You’re sold a dream for the price of a nightmare.”  What could be considered one of the heaviest tracks on the album, “Way of Pain” delivers raw, visceral vocals and chugging guitars while “R3D DOT” doubles down on the brutal, no punches pulled lyrics: “Heads to collect/Like a debt/Only blood bought.”

The album is paced well with less aggressive, but no less meaty tracks like “Figure 8”, radio single “Blindfold”, and what one might consider the group’s first love song, “Stay With Me” given lyrics like, “You take me as I am/Through the broken and the damned/You find the better in me”.

The final track, “Silhouette”, is a standout track focusing on loss and the heartbreak that comes with it. The clean vocal delivery is almost ethereal until the bridge when the screams become almost angry.

Landfall is a tight 43 minutes long, and well worth the time. The album is now streaming on all major platforms.

Wage War is set to embark on a world tour starting with Sick New World on October 24th in Fort Worth, TX. You can find tickets here https://wagewarband.com/ 

Track List:

1. Landfall

2. Sweet Dreams

3. Silk

4. Figure 8

5. God Complex

6. Stay With Me

7. Silence Has Spoken

8. Way of Pain

9. R3D DOT

10. Blindfold

11. Spellbound

12. Song of the Swamp

13. Silhouette