There’s a certain poetry in how Despised Icon keep disappearing and returning. Every few years, Montreal’s most ferocious export resurfaces, drops an album that sounds like the apocalypse filtered through a distortion pedal, and vanishes again. Shadow Work, their seventh full-length and first since 2019’s Purgatory, arrives six years later like a clenched fist slamming back onto the table. It’s not a reinvention, and thank god for that. What it is: a refinement of everything the band does best. Technical death metal precision meets hardcore urgency and that distinct Québécois grit no one else has replicated.
The title track opens with a storm of blastbeats and coiled riffs that unfold with cruel efficiency. You can hear the confidence of a band that doesn’t need to prove its brutality. They know exactly where the groove should hit, when to pull back, and how to let a riff breathe before it detonates. Dual vocalists Alex Erian and Steve Marois remain a study in contrasts: one all bark and snarl, the other a subterranean roar. Together, they form a rhythm section of human rage. It’s chaotic but strangely precise, like a street fight choreographed by a mathematician.
Over My Dead Body features Matt Honeycutt of Kublai Khan TX, and it’s pure hardcore energy. Sharp, relentless, muscular. There’s barely any deathcore left in the bones here, which is exactly why it lands so hard. Honeycutt’s vocal grit meshes seamlessly with Erian’s, and for a few minutes, you could almost mistake them for a pit-minded supergroup.
By the time Death of an Artist rolls in, the record feels like a conversation between eras: the feral chaos of The Healing Process meeting the tightly wound aggression of Beast. Melody creeps in around the edges, not enough to soften the blow but enough to hint at introspection. Even the brief guitar solo feels like a nod to those early death metal influences that got folded into their sound back when “deathcore” wasn’t a marketing term.
Shadow Work excels at pacing. Every track feels like a different facet of the same emotional outburst. Corpse Pose swings between hardcore stomp and death metal sprint, while The Apparition leans darker, almost blackened, its tremolo riffs swirling in and out of dissonance. There’s atmosphere here that wasn’t as prominent before. They’ve stripped away the genre’s tired symphonic flourishes, opting for something rawer, colder.
Reaper takes heaviness to absurd levels. Featuring Tom Barber and Scott Ian Lewis, it’s a vocal gauntlet that sounds like three demons competing for the same microphone. Yet even here, amidst the chaos, there’s structure. The riffs pivot sharply, tempo shifts feel intentional, and the production (handled by Erian and Eric Jarrin with Christian Donaldson mixing) keeps everything clear without sanding off the rough edges. Donaldson’s touch is unmistakable: that sharp, punchy snare and guitars that sound both massive and contained.
Around the midpoint, In Memoriam offers a breather, though “breather” might be generous. It’s haunting rather than violent, with moments that flirt with melody and even, briefly, vulnerability. Keyboardist Misstiq adds an eerie dimension, a ghostly shimmer behind the brutality. It’s the kind of experiment that might have fallen flat in lesser hands, but Despised Icon have always been good at finding the emotional core beneath the aggression.
By the time you hit Omen of Misfortune and Obsessive Compulsive Disaster, the record is deep into its stride. The grooves hit harder, transitions feel sharper, and there’s a sense of the band fully inhabiting their identity. Obsessive Compulsive Disaster especially stands out: rhythmic, feral, and surprisingly catchy for something that sounds like a building collapsing in time with your heartbeat. That moment around a minute and a half in, when everything locks into a lurching mid-tempo groove, reminds you how good this band is at making chaos danceable.
The short, furious ContreCoeur is pure catharsis: ninety seconds of grind-inflected rage with French vocals thrown in, a nod to their roots and maybe a middle finger to anyone who thought they’d ever soften. Then comes Fallen Ones, the closer, which pulls off the rare trick of being both brutal and strangely elegiac. The flamenco-style guitar in the final moments is unexpected, even beautiful in its dissonance. A flicker of humanity amid the wreckage.
What’s striking about Shadow Work isn’t how heavy it is (heaviness is a given) but how self-aware it feels. After two decades, Despised Icon are no longer trying to outrun their past. They’re dissecting it, refining it, finding meaning in the repetition. The title itself feels like a statement of intent: this is the band turning inward, processing their own history, their own mythology. They’re not teenagers playing blastbeats in a basement anymore. They’re veterans who understand that sometimes the most violent sound you can make is one rooted in control.
Deathcore as a genre has grown bloated over the years, buried under layers of cinematic bombast and algorithmic precision. Despised Icon, meanwhile, have remained unswayed by trends. They’ve watched younger bands turn breakdowns into TikTok fodder, and rather than chase relevance, they’ve doubled down on authenticity. There’s power in that kind of restraint. It’s what makes Shadow Work feel timeless: not nostalgic, not reactionary, but grounded in an understanding of why this music mattered in the first place.
At thirty-seven minutes, it’s a tight, relentless listen that never overstays its welcome. There are no filler tracks, no indulgent detours. Just six musicians doing what they do better than almost anyone else: making violence sound like renewal. The riffs are still serrated, the vocals still monstrous, but there’s reflection threading through the carnage.
Maybe that’s what makes Shadow Work so compelling: it feels like Despised Icon finally allowing themselves to breathe without letting go of the rage. It’s the sound of a band comfortable in their own skin, aware of the weight of their legacy but still hungry enough to push forward. In a genre often obsessed with extremes, that kind of maturity might be the heaviest thing of all.
Shadow Work will be released on October 31 via Nuclear Blast Records.
Despised Icon play Club Soda on December 6 and 7.
