Balmora // These Graven Halls // Album Review

Connecticut Melodic Deathcore newcomers Balmora are taking the hardcore/metalcore scene by the throat. Branding their own style of death & black metal like The Black Dahlia Murder & Emperor with the witty & smart breakdowns of On Broken Wings while being soaked in the melodies of Avenged Sevenfold & Philip Glass.

Coming into the scene in 2023 with their “As the Sun Sets on the Longest Day Under the Weight of a Blackened Sky” Split EP with Razel Got Her Wings, but it wasn’t until the band’s first EP “With Thorns of Glass and Petals of Grief” later that year that heads turned & brought a new era of young bands bringing back a melting pot of styles that for flood of new listeners of hardcore might of not heard & starting a new age of metalcore.

“These Graven Halls”, a debut full-length that doesn’t merely revisit the ghosts of early 2000s metalcore it drags them screaming through a cathedral of blackened melodrama, dungeon synth atmosphere, melodeath grandeur and cyber-age emotional collapse.

This is not nostalgia-core…. This is an obsession given form.

For anyone who has followed Balmora through the fever-dream intensity of their early material, “These Graven Halls” feels like the logical mutation of everything they hinted at before. The difference now is scale. This record breathes differently. It sprawls. It lunges. It collapses under its own emotional weight only to rise again wearing another genre’s skin.

And remarkably, most of it works.

The current incarnation of the band sees Paul Cole handling vocals, with Jay and Collin Flynn sharing guitar duties, Danny on bass and Chris Torok behind the drum kit. Together, they sound less like a modern hardcore band and more like five people trying to cram every formative musical trauma they’ve ever experienced into forty-six minutes of controlled chaos.

Opening track “Balmora” is an immediate declaration of intent. There’s no easing into this record. The guitars arrive in a storm of tremolo-picked violence before crashing into breakdowns that feel indebted equally to On Broken Wings and Scandinavian melodeath. The production is dense but intentionally raw around the edges, preserving the sensation that the whole thing might fly apart at any second. Jay’s guitar work throughout the album is particularly staggering, not because of technical excess, but because of compositional ambition. These riffs are layered with purpose. Melodies appear for mere seconds before being swallowed by panic-stricken rhythmic assaults.

“Ammonite,” featuring Empty Shell Casing and DJ PUNCHDRUNK, immediately widens the sonic palette. Scratching over metallic chaos should sound ridiculous in theory, yet Balmora somehow makes it feel essential. There’s a very deliberate early-2000s DNA running through this song a collision of metallic hardcore, nu-metal residue and blackened atmospherics but the band avoids parody by committing fully to the aesthetic. The transitions are absurdly complex. Tempo shifts happen mid-phrase. Blast beats dissolve into half-time mosh sections without warning. Chris Torok’s drumming deserves enormous praise here; his performance across the album is athletic without becoming sterile, constantly changing shape underneath the guitars.

Then comes “Ophelia,” arguably the emotional centrepiece of the record. Featuring Brie Percy from Holder, the track demonstrates Balmora’s strongest quality: their ability to balance overwhelming aggression with genuine melancholy. Percy’s guest vocal appearance adds a spectral fragility to the song, floating above the chaos rather than competing with it. Meanwhile, Paul Cole delivers one of the album’s finest performances, moving from venomous screams into desperate, near-spoken passages with startling conviction.

The songwriting itself deserves serious discussion because this is where “These Graven Halls” separates itself from revivalist peers. Too many modern metalcore records rely entirely on aesthetic reconstruction. Balmora instead writes songs like progressive composers trapped inside MySpace-era breakdown culture. “Inheritance & Solitude” is perhaps the best example. What begins as blistering melodic death metal suddenly mutates into eerie dungeon-synth passages inspired by Silent Hill before returning to crushing, metallic hardcore violence. Lesser bands would make those transitions feel gimmicky. Balmora makes them feel cinematic.

And yet, for all its complexity, the album never disappears into self-indulgent musicianship. Every melodic flourish serves the atmosphere. Every breakdown feels emotionally motivated rather than algorithmically inserted. Even interlude tracks like “…an apology everlasting…” and “…an effigy to the star of all sorrow…” function as vital breathing spaces, drenching the listener in gothic unease before the next wave of devastation arrives.

“The Beautiful Writing” featuring I Promised The World leans hardest into the band’s theatrical tendencies. There are moments here that genuinely recall mid-2000s screamo and post-hardcore in the best possible sense: dramatic, overblown and painfully earnest. The layered guitar harmonies are magnificent, while Danny’s bass tone provides a subterranean heft often missing from modern metalcore production.

“Needles & Rags” and “The Day You Died” push further into horror-soundtrack territory, drenched in synth textures that feel directly inspired by survival-horror games and dark-fantasy cinema. Balmora clearly understands that the atmosphere can be just as heavy as distortion. The album repeatedly weaponises tension rather than simply bludgeoning the listener with constant brutality.

“Augustyne” featuring Xavier from Upon Stone is my favourite track on the album; it’s pure blackened melodeath ecstasy. The guest appearance feels perfectly chosen, amplifying the band’s Scandinavian influence without overshadowing their identity. The twin-guitar work here is absolutely phenomenal, with soaring leads crashing against savage rhythmic chugging in ways that recall early Black Dahlia Murder while still sounding unmistakably Balmora.

Then there’s “Timor Mortis.” Six minutes of beautifully excessive chaos.

This track encapsulates the entire record: anime-villain grandeur, dungeon-synth ambience, melodic death-metal heroics, and catastrophic breakdowns stitched together with astonishing confidence. It’s the kind of song that could collapse under its own ambition in lesser hands. Instead, Balmora transforms excess into identity.

The album’s strangest moment arrives with the closing track “NGV,” featuring LdPckWntr, LORD THOMPXZON and k420k. Incorporating cloud rap and experimental hip-hop influences into an already overloaded metalcore album should be a disaster. Somehow, it instead feels like the final fracture in the album’s psychological descent. It won’t work for everyone, but its inclusion proves that Balmora are not interested in becoming prisoners of genre expectation.

What ultimately makes “These Graven Halls” so compelling is that it feels utterly sincere. This isn’t cynical revivalism aimed at cashing in on Y2K nostalgia. Balmora genuinely LOVE this music, all of it. The melodeath riff worship, the black metal atmosphere, the breakdowns, the emo melodrama, the video game aesthetics, the cyber-goth sadness. Rather than sanitising those influences into something marketable, they throw them together recklessly and trust the emotional intensity to hold everything together.

Most of the time it works but there are moments where the record threatens to overwhelm itself. Some listeners may find the constant stylistic shifts exhausting. Others will call it indulgent. But honestly, that chaos is part of the appeal. “These Graven Halls” sounds like five musicians desperately trying to communicate every obsession they’ve ever had before the world ends tomorrow morning.

And in heavy music, that kind of passion still matters. Balmora has not made a perfect record. They’ve made something far more interesting.

Review: Joseph Mitchell

THESE GRAVEN HALLS is out May 29th, 2026 via DAZE