VOID ETERNAL – nothing, nowhere.

Over the past four albums, nothing, nowhere’s style of emo-rap has edged closer and closer to his hardcore influences. While he’s always had a close relationship with emo and post-hardcore bands, his own music was distinctly rooted in hip-hop. On his newest full-length VOID ETERNAL, nothing, nowhere takes the full plunge into nu-metal territory. Kicking off with explosive riffs and crushing melodies, the album feels worlds away from his earliest SoundCloud releases. A throwback to the Y2K nu-metal sound complete with LimeWire mp3 spellings of song titles, VOID ETERNAL is a homage project at heart. With features from Lorna Shore, SEEYOUSPACECOWBOY, Silverstein, Static Dress, Underoath, and more, the album aims to bridge the gap between the heyday of post-hardcore together with the genre’s evolution. Nothing, nowhere acts as the centerpiece, a collage of influences that manifests as the logical endpoint for rap’s fusion with metal and punk.

For most of VOID ETERNAL’s runtime, nothing, nowhere plays up his nostalgia for the heavy breakdowns and melodic rapping of 2000s nu-metal bands. On “PSYCHO_PSYCHIATRY”, the high-pitched riffing followed by distorted vocals is a precise Chester Bennington inflection. The song’s latter half even slows down to a crawl as the Linkin Park inspiration takes hold. Thankfully, the song here is interesting enough that it doesn’t devolve into a copy-paste formula but the rest of the album isn’t always so lucky. “THIRST4VIOLENCE” is unimaginably boring, a shameless attempt at a Tik Tok hit with a terrible feature from Freddie Dredd. “M1SERY_SYNDROME” is so preoccupied with a memorable hook that the rest of the song sounds like someone typed in “post-hardcore song from 2004” into an AI generator. Despite the incredible potential of the features, it’s ironically the solo songs that have the most interesting concepts going on. VOID ETERNAL’s biggest problem is that it rarely offers anything interesting from nothing, nowhere when he’s teaming up with another band. I doubt anyone would notice if we replaced his vocals with any other generic emo rapper from SoundCloud. His vocal style doesn’t come through on these songs and the mixing makes his usual brand of emotive rapping difficult to discern. Worse, the expectations from features of this caliber fall flat because they don’t embody their music on VOID ETERNAL. If I listened to the album without looking at the features, the only one I might be able to pick out is Pete Wentz. The rest are painfully generic, almost as if they had to discard whatever traits made them compelling in the first place.

VOID ETERNAL has some interesting concepts but as an album, it feels like a mess. Nothing, nowhere’s melodic intuitions carry much of his vocal performances here yet it’s never enough to make the individual songs stand out as more than derivative rehashes of 2000s nu-metal. On the surface level, it’s a fun listen with catchy hooks, hefty breakdowns to mosh to, and growling guitars. By the time you reach the midpoint of the album though, the formula quickly becomes repetitive and stale. Even the attempts to create something unique like “VEN0M” evolving shuffling 808s to a full metal song feels phoned in when there aren’t any distinguishing features from either vocalist. Unfortunately, VOID ETERNAL squanders much of its potential and leaves you wondering if nu-metal was better off as a remnant of the past.

Must Listens: PSYCHO_PSYCHIATRY, SUICIDE_PACT, ER4SER

53/100

About the Author

Jeff

I turned my incoherent ramblings on music, anime, and video games into an entire blog.

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