Six years after their latest full-length (and five after their latest EP), Shadows in finally back with a new album and while DIG took quite some time to make, it was absolutely worth the wait.

The band was formed in 2016 by three founding members of local legends FACT (after that band fell apart) and their intention was to take things back to square one and start over (as they told us in our interview back in 2016). And they did that by taking the sound of FACT one step further, creating and even more refined mixture of US sort of melodic punk rock and pure hardcore agression, inflused with a little bit of metal and metalcore here and there.

Their frst two EPs and the following album (Illuminate from 2017) were pure gold, but their second album, Torches from 2018, while still a good release, was noticable weaker, with only a handful of really strong tracks. They released another EP the following years, but then took a break from studio work for a while. And it seems that this break (spent with playing live literally non-stop) is just what they needed and with this new album they even managed to top Illuminate.

The opening Climb jumps right into the middle and throws everything at us that makes Shadows so damn good: unexpected tempo changes, triple singing and a seamless mix of melodic parts and no-holds-barred hardcore brutality. Oh, I did I mention that insanely fun breakdown in the middle? So, we start at the absolute top, but the album never lets down one bit and manages to keep this level of energy and creatity all the way till the end. The quality is so even, that it is pretty difficult to pick any standout tracks, but Climb, the hard-hitting Supercar and the melodic Drifting are definitely amongst the favorites. And while all tracks follow more-or-less the same formula, they always twist and trun it around a bit to make each and every track unique in its own way and that’s one of the reasons why the album never gets tired and offers something new to discover on each repeated listens. As I said in the beginning, this album was definitely worth the wait and it isn’t just the band’s best so far, but also one of the overall best releases of this year.

DIG
2024.09.20
Caffeine Bomb Organics / cd, digital
01.Climb
02.Waste No Reasons
03.Walk Away
04.Timelines
05.Supercar
06.Drifting
07.A Ghost Of Walls
08.Daylight
09.Resist
10.My Everything