Dylan Walker and the rest of Full of Hell have spent over a decade making music that treats genre as a resource to be exhausted rather than a home to return to, grindcore, noise, black metal, death metal, industrial, all of it fed into a process that produces something consistently more extreme than any of its component parts. Broken Sword, Rotten Shield arrives with medieval imagery in the track titles (“Knight’s Oath,” “Mirrorhelm,” “To Ruin and the World’s Ending”) that suggests a thematic framework the band has never employed so explicitly before, and the music rises to meet the implications.
“Broken Sword, Rotten Shield” opens with the record’s central statement: something has already failed, and what remains is the failure’s aftermath. The track sets the album’s pace and sensibility, fast where necessary, dense throughout, Walker’s vocals operating at the intersection of a scream and a signal processed past the point of voice. “Corpselight” is the album’s most purely melodic moment, a relative term for a band whose melodic instincts are as extreme as everything else, but the track has a shape that the others orbit around. “Knight’s Oath” brings a gravity that earns the medieval framing: a track about commitment and what it costs, the music matching that weight without becoming pompous about it.
“To Ruin and the World’s Ending” closes with the album’s most expansive track, seven tracks in and the band is still finding new approaches within a framework that has been consistently extreme throughout. The ending isn’t cathartic exactly, but it is complete.
Noisier than grindcore, more structured than pure noise, Full of Hell’s production sits at a point of maximum controlled chaos. Individual instruments are audible but not clean; the mix has a density that functions as its own texture, a wall of sound that has been specifically engineered rather than accidentally achieved. Walker’s vocals are mixed to sit within the wall rather than above it, which makes them feel like another instrument rather than a frontman. The dynamic range is compressed, not by mistake but as a statement about what kind of listening experience this is supposed to be.
Standout tracks: Corpselight, Knight’s Oath, Broken Sword Rotten Shield
Full of Hell have always been reliable. Broken Sword, Rotten Shield is more than reliable, it’s the record that feels like they found exactly the right frame for everything they’ve been building toward.
