Remember... You Must Die

Remember… You Must Die is blunt even by deathcore standards. Suicide Silence’s seventh studio album works in compact, punishing bursts, with the guitars and rhythm section repeatedly tightening around Eddie Hermida’s vocals before breaking into the kind of low, physical passages that make the genre feel almost architectural. There is little interest in softening the impact, but the record is more controlled than simple extremity suggests.

The album marked a return to Century Media Records, the label that had released the band’s first three full-lengths. During 2022, drummer Alex Lopez left the group, with Ernie Iniguez, who had already played on Become the Hunter, stepping in for live duties. Suicide Silence announced the new album that June and worked with producer Taylor Young, whose background in heavy music suits a record that prizes weight, definition and immediacy. The rollout began with “You Must Die” in August 2022, followed by “Capable of Violence (N.F.W.)”, “Alter of Self” and “Dying Life”. Those titles tell you something about the album’s emotional temperature before hearing it, but the performances stop the aggression becoming anonymous. The riffs constantly shift their centre of gravity, Hermida moves between different shades of harsh vocal delivery, and the band understand the value of leaving just enough air around a breakdown for the next hit to feel larger.

Released on 10 March 2023, Remember… You Must Die runs for under 40 minutes and received broadly positive notices across the metal press. The record does not depend on reinvention; its achievement is concentration. Suicide Silence know exactly what sort of physical response this music is built to create, yet the best moments come from arrangement rather than sheer volume: tension, release, sudden changes of pace and the moment a tightly wound passage finally collapses into something enormous.