Back in the days of Myspace and other defunct social media, deathcore and metalcore bands were flooding the marketplace and often trying to outdo each other when it came to extremity in both musical style and lyrical content. If you look back to those years you’ll find plenty of albums with extremely long song titles that often had movie or pop culture references and spastic songwriting, with some performed better than others. Quite a few of the groups from that time fizzled out and simply disappeared, gaining some additional cult followings in the decade since, but others have unexpectedly returned to give things another try. Dr. Acula did that successfully last year, and in 2023 it’s See You Next Tuesday’s turn. See You Next Tuesday started off on the deathcore/mathcore side with their 2007 debut Parasite having all the trademarks of the scene back then, but by 2008’s Intervals they had transitioned to more of a death/grind sound and more serious leaning subject matter. The band imploded shortly after, making this transition have a bit less of an impact than it should’ve. But album number three, Distractions, feels like it’s making up for lost time and picks up where See You Next Tuesday left off, offering a blistering burst of dark and gritty grind.
Whether you were with the group during their earlier days that found them using a lot of humor and throwing as many extreme music styles as possible together or are just now finding them for the first time, there’s a lot to like about Distractions. Like 2008’s Intervals, See You Next Tuesday has left behind some of the sillier and lighthearted elements of their genres in favor of heavy hitting and bleak death metal, grind, and mathcore that tries to destroy everything in its path. Despite fifteen years passing between Intervals and Distractions, the material here feels tight and razor sharp and its clear that they can grind, shred, and bludgeon with some of the best out there. The focus remains on short, punchier songwriting that crams fast bursts of blasting, slower grooves, and angular riffs into a minute or two while throwing in some unexpected transitions. This makes Distractions the type of album that flies by in a blur the first few times, but as you start to pick out the details over extended listens there are specific riffs that are likely to stick with you. Songs like “This Happy Madness” have stuck with me over time thanks to how they smartly move between the frantic blasting and half-tempo grooves from one second to the next, stringing things together into controlled chaos. The bulk of the run-time is used up by closing track “Strange Music”, where See You Next Tuesday takes the bleak tonality and atmosphere of the death/grind songs and goes full-on sludge for seven and a half minutes. They have tried these slower tracks in the past, but here the instrumentation sprawls outwards and reaches even grander heights than before, even if it does still feel a bit overstretched and longer than it needs to be.
Rather than launching right into their grind attack, See You Next Tuesday re-introduces themselves on opener “How Insensitive” with clips of people saying sentences that have the word cunt in them while grittier, almost industrial soundscapes play over top. It’s neat to see them reference the more tongue in cheek origins of their band name and sound, while also making it clear that listeners are in for a very bleak and darker experience overall. Vocalist Chris Fox returns and delivers a similar mix of low growls and higher pitched screams, though compared to the band’s previous discography the pitch sounds a bit more oriented towards the low end. Fox brings a considerable amount of variety to the band’s material, switching regularly between raspy screams, death growls, and some hardcore style yelling that leads into gang vocals on songs like “Hey Look, No Crying”. With themes around mental health and other issues, it’s clear that Fox and company have been through some stuff in the past fifteen years, but it makes the music hit all that much harder. My only complaint on the vocal side is that the production approach tries to make everything so loud and noisy that the growls get lost in the mix and don’t come through as clearly as they could.
Coming back after a fifteen year gap is no easy feat, but See You Next Tuesday has seamlessly picked up where they left off and returned with an album filled with destructive and dark grind that is even tighter and technically proficient than before. You’ll likely need a few times through to make sense of some of the details given the short track lengths, but there’s plenty here to keep listeners returning. I would like to see the group tweak and refine some of the sludge elements, as there’s room to further incorporate it into the core material rather than saving the majority for a track at the end, but this is a fantastic return and here’s hoping it leads to more. Distractions is available from Good Fight Music.
-Review by Chris Dahlberg