The Grove | Almanac

A Metal That Is Difficult to Put in a Box

It was this sense of unpredictability that accompanied my first experience with Warforged. Formed in Chicago in 2012, the band arrives at its third album since 2019 carrying a reputation tied to progressive and experimental death metal. But these labels only provide a rough direction. On The Grove | Almanac, dissonant guitars, broken rhythms, extreme vocals, melodic passages, and electronic textures coexist in music that seems deliberately distrustful of any predictable path.

All the complexity of the album does not seem to exist simply to show how much the musicians can play. The technique is there, and in abundance, but it is placed within the songs. The arrangements change direction, the instruments take on different roles, and the rhythms constantly transform, yet there is a clear attempt to make these pieces belong to the same organism. This is precisely what prevents the album from becoming merely a collection of instrumental showcases.

When the Weight Needs to Be Built

The Grove | Almanac understands heaviness in a less immediate way. Instead of pouring out distortion from the very first moment, the band often prepares the ground. Miserable No Life King, for example, begins in a minimalist manner, with extreme vocals surrounded by an unusual atmosphere before the guitars gradually increase the pressure. When the drums and distortion come in with greater force, the impact feels greater precisely because it was not given away for free.

This approach reappears throughout the album. The riffs can take angular and uncomfortable shapes, while the tempos change without warning and the guitars work through different textures. At some moments, the result approaches an extremely heavy mass, while at others, the music pulls back and leaves room for dark melodies and more contemplative environments. I particularly like this way of handling aggression, it is not permanently turned up to maximum, and that is why its most violent moments can truly stand out.

A Drum Performance That Keeps Everything Moving

Within this setting, Jason Nitts' drumming plays a fundamental role. What impresses me is not only the technique, but the ability to change behavior along with the composition. There are blast beats, double kicks, simpler grooves, tempo changes, and irregular patterns, but everything seems to respond to what the music needs at that particular moment. On an album so full of twists and turns, the drums function almost like the mechanism that keeps the entire machine running.

A Bustle in Your Hedgerow may be one of the best examples of this approach. The track brings together low and irregular guitars, aggressive vocals, tempo changes, and a progressive atmosphere that could easily turn almost nine minutes into an exercise in showing off. That is not what happens. There is an impressive amount of information, but the instrumental performance serves the construction of the track. For me, this is one of the moments when Warforged's approach becomes clearest.

The Strange Can Also Be Melodic

Another strength of the album lies in the way the band allows melody to exist within this turbulent environment. I Wish You Could Live Forever lowers the temperature and introduces a more melancholic tone, while Novocaine Grace explores vocal harmonies and an even more unusual approach. These passages do not function merely as intervals between heavy moments, they expand the album's emotional vocabulary.

This contrast is one of the things I enjoy most about The Grove | Almanac. The music can place a relatively restrained beat alongside abrasive vocals, or an almost ethereal texture against guitars that seem designed to make everything uncomfortable. There is a kind of unstable balance at work here, just when I think I finally understand the direction of a track, some change rearranges the pieces.

A Labyrinth That Demands Attention

But this same characteristic also creates, perhaps, the album's main problem. The Grove | Almanac does not offer many easy points of reference. It is roughly 49 minutes of rhythmic changes, dissonance, different textures, and structures that rely little on repetition. The result can be fascinating when I am willing to follow every detail, but it can also be exhausting when I try to absorb everything at once.

This difficulty does not seem accidental to me. The album demands the listener's participation. Some songs begin to make more sense as their different layers become recognizable, turning subsequent listens into a kind of musical investigation. At the same time, not every idea reaches the same level of development. Some moments sound less convincing than the stronger structures surrounding them, especially when the band interrupts a particularly rich development with a solution that seems less integrated into the whole.

An Evolution That Makes Sense

The album also gains strength when viewed within the band's trajectory. After a first release marked by an enormous number of ideas and a more scattered approach, Warforged found in The Grove | Sundial a more atmospheric and focused direction. The Grove | Almanac continues along this path without abandoning the willingness to experiment. The difference lies less in reducing ambition and more in better organizing what the band wants to do.

For that reason, I do not see the complexity of The Grove | Almanac as a simple exercise in virtuosity. The album seems interested in discovering how far an extreme composition can be fragmented without completely losing its meaning. At times, this pursuit produces extraordinary results, at others, the music comes close to crossing the line between density and excess. It is a risky gamble, but I would rather have a band willing to take that risk than one that always chooses the most comfortable path.

The Result of a Bold Gamble

After listening to the album as a whole, my impression is of a work that finds its greatest strength precisely in this tension. The Grove | Almanac can be brutal without relying on constant brutality, technical without turning every passage into a showcase, and atmospheric without abandoning its weight. Not every decision works with the same efficiency, but the best ones reveal a band with a very particular vision of how to combine extremity, experimentation, and composition.

What stays with me is not a single track or a specific riff, but the feeling that Warforged has built a record that needs to be deciphered rather than simply consumed. It does not reveal its best qualities immediately, nor does it try to make the listener's job easier. For those willing to enter this irregular terrain, there is plenty to discover among its broken rhythms, dissonant guitars, dynamic shifts, and unexpectedly melodic moments.

The Grove | Almanac is not a perfect album, and perhaps its own ambition makes perfection an unsuitable expectation. Some choices could be more cohesive, and certain moments lose strength when compared to the more fully realized passages. Still, when Warforged gets it right, the music takes on a personality that is difficult to confuse with that of any other band. In the end, it is precisely this ability to transform complexity into something recognizable that makes this a work worth listening to carefully and, above all, more than once.