Album Review: Oathbound-Colors In Grey

Seattle progressive metalcore band Oathbound channel their raw, unfiltered emotion that defines the human condition while crafting sonic soundscapes that are as emotionally resonant as they are sonically powerful on their new album, Colors In Grey.

Sometimes, when a band sets out to make a record, it's less about documenting wounds and more about sculpting something luminous from the pain that put them there in the first place. Coming into Oathbound’s Colors In Grey (mixed by Aaron Chaparian (As I Lay Dying, Bleeding Through, Chimaira), Oathbound finds itself building a tension-imbued record. Within the seams of heaviness and fragility, clarity and distortion, the past and the future, Colors in Grey have created something that doesn’t fall into absolutes but instead chooses to live within the gradients of experience, the emotional half-steps in which most of our transformations take place.

From the beginning of Colors In Grey, the album title is not meant to be metaphorical; it's a heavily inked statement, permanently etched into one’s skin to be remembered and relived over and over again. The opening tracks “Origins,” “Colors in Grey,” and “Set Adrift” begin their journey through emotional spectrums, each existing within the extremes of each moment. Atmospheric yet grounded within its soundscapes, heavy yet spacious, melodic yet uncomfortably raw, these opening engaging moments set the stage for an album that gives these gravid concepts room to breathe but never enough to escape the chaos that exists within, giving way to other excursions within Colors In Grey that build on this feeling of intimate closeness to the point where it is claustrophobically honest.

Stepping into the second half of the album, “Misunderstood (featuring Patrick Franiuck),” “The Masks We Wear,” and “Insomniac,” Oathbound creates an instrumental storm of shimmering synths and guitars, sawtoothed percussive energy, and basslines that thrum with the undercurrents of anxiety. Colors In Grey makes it a point to have each sound carry its own unique emotional weight.

As the album comes to a close with final moments, “Searching For An Answer,” “Hold On,” and “False Ideals,” Oathbound continues to mold experiences that lyrically and emotionally move in between spaces—moments where one is no longer who they thought they were but not yet at a place of who they want to be entirely. Such emotional moments are written with a kind of introspective sharpness that does a brilliant job of avoiding melodrama and instead leans into emotional truths that are especially felt in the production and instrumental worlds built in “Hold On” and “False Ideals.”

Colors In Grey, for all its nostalgic metalcore bliss and gorgeous production, tells a rather emotionally beautiful story about the discomfort of shedding older parts of one’s self and the numbness and denial that come with the battles of self-preservation and self-sabotage. Within these nonlinear, textured memories lies the beauty of imperfection and the idea that healing is rarely a clean escape from the pain it creates. Each track feels like an emotional vantage point, a different shade that bleeds into the same internal soundscape, and Oathbound succeeds in merging these points of tension into an infectious psychological portrait of suffering and the journey it takes to reach a point not of resolution but of acceptance.