Nightlife

With a sound rooted in metalcore and accented by dance-pop and dubstep, featuring screamed lyrics straight out of a club banger, and released on Epitaph, one of punk's most enduring labels, Skip the Foreplay's debut album shows that they're a band who aren't interested in being easily categorized. Nightlife, the Canadian electronicore outfit's first outing, finds the band taking all of the aforementioned elements and throwing them in a blender to create a genre-bending mix that ends up being surprisingly coherent. Using breakdown-heavy metalcore as the through line for the album, the band uses the other elements to season the songs, adding a synth run to a chorus or the occasional R&B-touched departure in place of a boilerplate breakdown to keep the listener guessing where they're going at any given moment. While other bands have attempted this formula, what helps set Skip the Foreplay apart are their lyrics. On the surface, the songs would seem to be filled with anguished ruminations about bottles of Dom Perignon and dancefloor drama, but if you scratch just a little beneath the surface you begin to uncover the sleazy underbelly of the club scene, with weapons snuck in past security, dosed drinks, and sexual predators waiting to take advantage of people. This darker side to the songs gives the album an unexpected depth, and at times even makes the strange mash-up of genres seem almost conceptual. While this might not make instant fans out of anyone already turned off by bands like Attack Attack! or Asking Alexandria, it definitely shows that there's more going on with some of these bands than you might think. For anyone already on board with the genre, don't hesitate to check these guys out. ~ Gregory Heaney