Release Date - 9th September 2022
Label - UNFD
Words- Tony Bliss
With volatile socio-political circumstances, a looming climate crisis, widespread contempt for our world leaders and the increasingly unshakable feeling that everything is, quite frankly, going to complete shit, there’s no better time for a new Stray From The Path album. Re-emerging onto the now post-COVID landscape more pissed-off and change-hungry than ever, Euthanasia makes it clear that any lockdown malaise has been given a swift boot into the past, as the band take aim at corruption and injustice with an arsenal of riffs and a tank full of punk rock spit.
The band are eager to establish that they aren’t fucking about early doors, the first few seconds of ‘Needful Things’ burying the listener under an avalanche of Knocked Loose meets RATM vitriol that is as blood-pumping as anything we have heard from the Stray camp yet. In all honesty, aside from the woozy, Deftones-esque detour of ‘Bread & Roses' (featuring a perfectly weighted vocal turn from Stick To Your Guns singer Jesse Barnett), the Long Island natives rarely allow the rev-counter to dip below the red. ‘III’ is an incensed (and occasionally blast-beat fuelled) look at police misconduct, ‘Guillotine’ a thunderous rap-metal chug-fest with all the shout-along, basement show aesthetic of the scenes formative years, and ‘Law Abiding Citizen’ an alt. metal floor-filler that brings the funk just as hard as the riffs.
Bowing out on two metalcore A-bombs with the ‘The Salt In Your Spit’ and ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ (the breakdown in which will wrench the sinew from your limbs) and the closing ‘Ladder Work’ replete with a touch of nu-metal scratching and a thudding, sample-led crescendo, Euthanasia may not take too many sonic risks across its thirty-seven minute run time, however its heroically bile-filled look at modern life is both a truckload of fun and more importantly has all the right lyrical targets squarely in its cross hairs.
7/10
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