Blood Youth – Starve

I was a teenager in the 90’s and I bore witness to birth of Nu Metal. To me it was a musical force like no other and when you had artists like Korn, Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, System of a Down, Spineshank, Linkin Park, Sevendust, Coal Chamber, Slipknot, Hed PE, Machine Head, Taproot, Static-X… (to name just a handful) blasting out your walkman back then, you can understand why it was so popular… well it was to me.

Bear in mind that nu metal hasn’t been in the limelight since the early 00’s and so for Blood Youth to come out with this particular album in 2019, is just AMAZING!

Why so amazing? Its heavy as hell thats why!

It’s got excellent groove, dirty breakdowns, catchy melodic vocals, brutal screams and at any given point in all the tracks on the album I could name a handful of bands that it sounds like and yet it still remains original.

Blood Youth’s wikipedia page says their genre is melodic hardcore, hardcore punk, post-hardcore, and punk metal… utter nonsense! In my opinion, it is nu metal through and through. Their album, Starve, is the embodiment of it and not even in an ironic way – at least I don’t think so anyway. It’s a deadly serious offering and executed perfectly by a band obviously well versed in this (ever so slightly dated) genre.

The production is incredible too – you can play it super quiet or crank it up to 11 and it still retains a perfectly rounded and full bodied sound. It’s wide spectrum of deep bass and crystal clear high frequency sounds allows for their overall guitar mix to relentlessly smash you in the face over and over again while the drum sound kicks you in the nuts just because it can.

Even given its genre, the album is very crafted. It has a whole range of musical layers from electric synths to pianos and backing choirs. Having only just being introduced to this band last week, I haven’t seen any live footage of them but I would be extremely keen to see how they perform live and if they strip it back at at all.

As always I listen to the drummer and quite simply, he is tight AF! OOofff that snare! Lovely drum sound and the drumming it’s self is apt for the style of music and throughout the album demonstrates some great fills and breakdowns.

I’m currently listening to this album about 3 to 4 times a day and I will continue to listen to it until my ears bleed or I finally get over my nostalgic love affair with the (under rated) nu metal genre.

If you cant be arsed to listen to the full album, here’s a music video for one of the standout tracks – Spineless…