Hawthorne Heights – Zero

This fifth full-length release from US metalcore mob Hawthorne Heights is billed as a concept album, based around the usual storyline (although admittedly one more often narrated by power metal outfits) about post-apocalyptic world/dystopian future where a totalitarian corporation has risen to overarching power and the ‘little man’ starts to fight back.

To be honest, I can’t really read the storyline in what is basically a collection of teenager-friendly pretty poppy-punky anthems (with a couple of ballads thrown in for good measure) which remind this reviewer of a lighter 30 Seconds To Mars (perhaps not a supremely surprising comparison, given 30STM collaborator Brian Virtue’s collaboration on production duties) mixed with touches of just about every other act in this sub-genre you care to name.

It’s well played and produced, thoughtfully constructed and there are a few decent hooks, but while ‘Zero’ doesn’t appeal to a hardened old metaller such as myself, this is as decenta stab, if not slightly more ambitious in its concept,  at this particular genre as I have heard in the recent past.

Hawthorne Heights ArtworkTracklist:

  1. Skeletons Remain (Transmission 1)
  2. Memories of Misery
  3. Darkside
  4. Spark
  5. Zero
  6. Anywhere But Here
  7. Hollow Hearts Unite
  8. Coalition Of Alternate Living Methods (Broadcast)
  9. Golden Parachutes
  10. Put Me Back Together
  11. Strangers
  12. 12. Ghost Town
  13. Lost In The Calm
  14. 14. Taken By The Dark
  15. Over And Out (Transmission 2)

‘Zero’ is out now on Red Entertainment.

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About Mark Ashby

no longer planetmosh staff