Within Temptation - "Bleed Out"
Within Temptation is one of the old guard of Symphonic Metal. Their debut album was a Gothic/Doom blend, but they shifted their sound for Mother Earth in 2000 to Symphonic/Celtic, and they never really looked back. Symphonic Metal was still in its infancy and not very well defined at the time, having only really become a thing in the early 90s (and half of the bands playing “symphonic metal” really just defined themselves that way). The genre would become a powerhouse in the 00s, though, with Within Temptation being a large part of the genre’s overall strength, though the majority was driven by the success of Nightwish.
Bleed Out is Within Temptation’s 8th full-length album, and their first in four years; the band’s 6th and 7th albums released in 2014 and 2019, respectively. That’s a nine-year gap between albums 6 & 8. The band has spoken multiple times about the slow-down in this period. Most notably in 2017, when vocalist Sharon den Adel announced her solo project, My Indigo. Den Adel found herself in a block and burned out. When she finally found some inspiration again, the songs didn’t feel appropriate for Within Temptation. Rather than becoming frustrated by this, den Adel embraced it and used this vein of creativity to get herself back in the groove. My Indigo, the self-titled album for this project, was a very Indie Pop Rock album with a ton of electronica infused.
More importantly, with that project serving as the creative lubrication for Within Temptation’s next album, 2019’s Resist was wildly different from everything they had ever done before. I mean, WT is normally pretty standard Symphonic Metal, tinged with a bit of Gothic and Alt. And over the years, they’ve sidled closer to the Rock/Metal divide, with many fans arguing that they’re straddling the fence, at best. Resist redoubled these cries, with a lot of division in both fan and critic reviews.
But Resist reinvented the band anew, creating a new sound for them with a lot of electronic production elements and some really wild genre-blending throughout the album which made each track sound incredibly unique. 2019 was the first year I sought out new albums specifically to review them and tracked scores throughout the year, and Within Temptation’s Resist won AOTY honors that year over Soen’s Lotus and The Hu’s The Gereg.
Within Temptation had already been one of my favorites, having rediscovered the band, essentially, in 2017 or so, and not heard anything from any albums after 2004’s The Silent Force. Resist easily secured them a spot at the top of my all-time lists, though.
And now, Bleed Out is finally here.
With their established songwriting issues, it only makes sense that the band decided to try a new approach: the band opted to focus, for a while, on just writing singles. And as Covid-19 ravaged the world, they leaned further into it. Of the 11 tracks on Bleed Out, only four are wholly new: opener “We Go to War”, “Worth Dying For”, “Cyanide Love”, and “Unbroken”.
The other seven have been released periodically since May of 2020, starting with “Entertain You”, which is Bleed Out’s closing track.
And, on top of this, the album really feels like a step back, stylistically, which is incredibly disappointing. Most of the innovation found in Resist is gone. And since the majority of tracks were conceived of as singles, there’s not a lot of cohesion across the album; that was another strength of Resist — I don’t believe that there was a lyrical connection in that album, but tonally, even with all of the variance, the album felt solid.
Thankfully, that’s where the negatives end.
As much as I hate how much time it took for this album to finally come together; as much as I loathe that it wasn’t conceived of as a singular unit; as much as I wish that it followed the stylistic footprints of Resist…
It is painfully clear that each and every song here has received a lot of attention. We may be back to the Symphonic Metal/Rock mainstay sound of the The Unforgiving and Hydra days, but every track is a banger. And the genre-blending isn’t gone entirely — it’s still there in some tracks.
The verses in “Entertain You” have this rhythmic Reggae-like quality. It’s subtle, but present. Title track “Bleed Out” infuses some Metalcore riffs into a deep, chuggy guitar line — den Adel talks about being influenced by Bad Omens, among others, while working on these songs, and that really comes through here. And then “Cyanide Love” sounds like it could be a collaboration with Hatsune Miku (though those bits are in German, not Japanese).
The amount of polish here is astounding. This album was worth the wait. And while I am a bit disappointed in some aspects of it, I can’t argue with the level of quality on each and every track.
Rating: Blue