Code Orange have been on the brink of a breakthrough since they were teenagers. A dozen years ago, the Pittsburgh kids rose from the local ranks to the taste-making Deathwish imprint before making their major-label debut with 2017’s Forever. Abrasive and volatile yet accessible, Forever became a consensus critical favorite, topping year-end lists at Rolling Stone and Revolver and prompting praise from The New York Times when it was nominated for a Grammy. They were a hit away, it seemed, from crossing over into whatever’s left of mainstream rock.
But Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting. Recorded with Nick Raskulinecz, who has spent 25 years helming consistently middling efforts from the likes of Ghost and Korn, Underneath aims to justify Code Orange’s major-label existence, from its rigorously high concept about the psychological damage of our digital reality to the warmed-over rock radio moves of its would-be hits. During “You and You Alone,” Jami Morgan seethes, “It’s killing me, every line you scribble on the page/In trying to be an amalgamation of everything you see.” It’s an unintentional encapsulation of Underneath, an album that wants to be so much it’s barely anything at all.
The central idea is obvious enough: Our online lives cause dangerously wide divisions within our personalities. Code Orange call nomophobia—a neologism for the fear of being without your phone—by name and criticize the din of modern life as “crowded Technovision.” They take this theme to its violent extreme, painting technology as a parasite feeding off our energy and a tool that will drive us—“the guinea pigs of a generation”—to madness or death. They quote Ricardo López, the Björk stalker who committed suicide after mailing her a bomb, and assail the way we have become “brains in chains.” Underneath reads like the Twitter account of a paranoid friend you muted long ago, or the slapdash musings of someone who shouldn’t smoke sativa after morning coffee.
The music itself prompts the same sort of shrug and chuckle. An overzealous pastiche full of inspirations but near-devoid of new ideas, Underneath is as goofy and garish as the worst of nu metal. Code Orange sprint between touchstones and subgenres as if they were running a Tough Mudder, trying to prove their versatility and grit. “Cold Metal Core” gilds grindcore with harsh noise, like Pig Destroyer with an unnecessarily big budget, while “Last Ones Left” founders in its attempt to find solid ground between Slipknot and Wolf Eyes. The metal riffs are more aluminum than iron, the industrial beats hilariously dated, and the power electronics too weak to stand on their own. Code Orange’s longtime enthusiasm for stop-time pauses—moments in which everything goes quiet, so they can redirect a song’s momentum—was once unpredictable and exhilarating. Now, it feels like a crutch.
The radio-ready anthems here are hackneyed and awkward, like ’90s leftovers reheated with post-millennial white adolescent rage. With its sustained guitar squeals and whisper-to-roar dynamics, “Who I Am” sounds like a teenager experimenting with basic electronics while listening to the Deftones. “The Easy Way” springboards from cheesy industrial signifiers to a pandering hook that recalls Filter. “Underneath”—the closing track and first single—is the ugly crust that got stuck between Sirius XM’s Lithium and Octane. It’s so repetitive, at least, that you can turn it off after the first half and save yourself the last two minutes.
Code Orange are proud practitioners of scene beef and self-aggrandizement. They seem to thrive on bombast and controversy, even telling Kerrang that “[Underneath] … is more relevant than anything that’s coming out in rock and metal this year. Period.” Underneath may indeed set them apart from the fray and push them to larger audiences, shouting back the chorus of “Who I Am” or grunting out some approximation of “Swallowing the Rabbit Whole.” But it will be at the expense of the very recent feeling that Code Orange could reshape the vanguard of popular metal.
