The only way Vein.fm’s second album might sound like a more hopeless reflection of the world today is if they wrote any of it in the past two years.The quintet finished recording This World Is Going to Ruin You at a locked-down New Jersey studio in April 2020, stunted by the pandemic while their 2018 debut Errorzone was still ascendant: a metalcore milestone that unified the Carhartt and AJ Soprano T-shirt factions like few others since their Boston Beatdown forefathers in Converge. But rather than leveling up on an expected timeline, they made lateral moves. There were inevitable side projects: most notably Fleshwater, a strong entry in an otherwise suffocating subgenre of hardcore bands practicing Deftones and Hum worship. They released Old Data in a New Machine, a compilation of remixes and B-sides whose “Vol. 1” seemed to promise more to come. They also added an “.fm” to their name that almost nobody says out loud. But these seemingly unrelated actions serve a unified purpose, to ready listeners for a version of the band that isn’t tied to what they did in 2018. And indeed, This World Is Going to Ruin You cannot simply be pegged as a lateral move or a leveling up: It explodes Vein.fm’s sound into seemingly dozens of different directions.
Despite inducting synth/turntablist Benno Levine as a full-time member, Vein.fm have largely dropped the tech in “Doomtech,” setting aside the breakbeats and breakdowns for ambience and blunt force, a blinding futuristic sheen swapped for a feel-bad rainbow of all rotted browns. Anthony DiDio described the lyrics as a “birth-to-death narrative,” often delivered in a panicked shriek or guttural bark that really does sound like either childbirth or death throes. The words are just about indecipherable without the album insert, so Vein.fm are wise enough to let the piledriven riffs of “Welcome Home” get the message across: Our birth-to-death narratives are nasty, brutish, and mostly short, at least until the closing duo of “Wavery” and “Funeral Sound” take up over a third of the album’s half-hour runtime.
Though the opening lyrics of This World Is Going to Ruin You are “Let go/Lay back like a patient,” the ensuing rhyme is more indicative of its mindset: “Let your conscience fuck the pavement.” “Pennies in the shit well/Pick ‘em up/Rinse ‘em off with your piss” is just a sample of what the lead single has to say about the human condition. But if the buckets upon buckets of Kool-Aid blood spilled in the video for “The Killing Womb” didn’t make it clear, two consecutive songs titled “Hellnight” and “Orgy at the Morgue” should settle any debates about whether Vein.fm has developed a sense of humor about themselves. It’s the difference between a dystopian, prestige horror film centered on experimental surgery and the analog gore of the Saw franchise.
Similarly, the plot of This World Is Going to Ruin You is a secondary concern, the dialogue mostly a self-aware series of prompts towards the next kill shot, each of which has to be more extreme than the last. No longer beholden to their signature alchemy of groove and grind, Vein.fm take an approach more akin to their remix album than Errorzone, doing everything they hinted at previously and doing it more. “Welcome Home” transposes detuned riffs to a tempo about half as slow as anything they’ve ever done, like if Slipknot contributed a chopped-and-screwed remix to Old Data in a New Machine. Conversely, the rave-rock hybrid “Magazine Beach,” named after a bucolic public park in Cambridge, could’ve feasibly fit on 120 Minutes, Headbanger’s Ball, and Amp playlists. Vein.fm have never fit more wrath and math into one song as they do on “Versus Wyoming,” which lasts all of 55 seconds. The impact of whatever’s happening at any given moment is amplified by the unseen—if the minute-long transitional tracks seem to cut off too early, something very different and just as thrilling will be happening 30 seconds from now.
Yet throughout, there’s a tension between what constitutes progress and regression; at times, This World Is Going to Ruin You feels like the album that could’ve come before Errorzone, from a band willing to try anything in search of a signature sound. When they lean on bionic drum programming and sinister samples during the album’s slower, more atmospheric moments, Vein.fm acknowledge massive debt to nu-adjacent classics like Iowa, White Pony, and The Fragile, benchmarks of the era’s genre fusion and progressive production values. But these days, it’s not so radical to hear a high-pass filter drum set against drop-C guitars. The melodic bent of “Wavery” and “Magazine Beach” is intriguing in the context of a Will Putney-produced album where listeners expect more breakdowns than choruses. But the hooks come off as a bit timid, not just compared to, say, “Left Behind” or “Rx Queen,” but also to Vein.fm’s own “Fear in Non Fiction.” What begins as a Brief History of Screamo in its scabrous, mutant origins fast-forwards to its platinum age with a clean vocal, swooping in to lift it toward the rafters. But the most thrilling and divisive moment of This World Is Going to Ruin You is also the most irreplicable—the hook is delivered by Thursday’s Geoff Rickly, a guy largely responsible for record execs throwing around millions at post-hardcore bands.
Perhaps the push toward accessibility on This World Is Going to Ruin You wouldn’t have sounded quite as tentative had it actually been released in 2020—before the first 20 seconds of “Virus://Vibrance” could be heard in Planet Rave’s embrace of late-’90s drum-n-bass; before the renewed critical and commercial interest in nü-metal; before the booming fortunes of Code Orange, Turnstile, and Knocked Loose proved there was a lane for uncompromising and artful heavy guitar music outside of its hardcore fanbase. Vein.fm still sound like a band ready to take on the world; only this time around, the world is just as ready for them.
