Album Review: Boundaries - Yearning: The Unbeautiful After

Two years after delivering a solidifying powerhouse of an album, Death is Little More, metalcore band Boundaries combines the finest elements of over 13 years of experience to create their new dark, heavy, and cinematic release. Yearning: The Unbeautiful After.

There are certain albums that feel like screams into the night. Screams so raw, you’re shaking, and you are not sure whether the tingling emanating from such feelings means you are alive or if it's just mere echoes of a pain that still haunts your bones. Boundaries’ Yearning: The Unbeautiful After is an album that lives in that moment, where its sound drags its own ghosts into the light and refuses to hide them or make them shapeless. Every track almost feels like a one-on-one confrontation, not necessarily with another person but with the parts of yourself you have spent years trying to bury under your skin through routine, silence, or the well-crafted guise of the lie that fools everyone else into believing you are “fine.” While the band has always had this ace approach to turning violence into a musical form of expression, this record hits a bit differently than the rest. The emotion is hitting you all at once, the sonic fury second. It's the kind of pain that doesn’t just hit upon release: it lingers and stains your inner existence for months, sometimes years, before you find a place of serenity within yourself.

From the start, this album makes it clear that it is not about honesty; anyone with a heart or the mental capacity to tell the truth can do this. This is about the yearning, not in a romantic sense, but an ugly, almost animalistic, unresolvable desire that stems from something you can’t quite name, but it’s there. “Malconscience,” “Skies Cast Amber Black,” and “May This Pain Never Leave” begin this record of showing how artfully someone can articulate the aftermath of every moment when someone thinks healing is but a hand's reach away, only for those hopes and dreams to be crushed under the weight of misfortune. What remains and what continues to settle for the rest of the album is the debris of that hope.

“Torn Wide Open (featuring Make Them Suffer),” “Bitter Ash, Bitter Love,” and nostalgically tinged metalcore beauty “Unequal Whole” continue to capture this feeling with a precision that borders on the uncomfortable. With percussive energies feeling like an uneven heartbeat dancing around riffs that sound during the early stages of a panic attack, trying to claw their way out of your ribs, each track sounds like someone’s mind venturing back to the past, remembering the trauma of each moment in real time. Some of the best features of these moments are their use of production, suffocating and mentally shattering in the best of ways. Every layer seems to artistically press itself into the vocals, like multiple punches to the gut, collapsing the distance more and more between the listener and the music until you are forced to take every relentless hit each track gives.

“Death Will Follow Me,” “The Leper’s Bell,” and “Crowned and Crucified (featuring Landon Tewers)” provide the album with some of its most paranoia-inducing heaviness. What becomes striking on this half of the album is how unnervingly self-aware the band is willing to be in order to prove a point. However, this isn’t mindless journaling about sporadic aggression. It’s a band ripping off the Band-Aid and internally excavating the pain, taking the blood, pus, and swelling and pushing them outward. While this isn’t exactly new territory in metalcore, what makes this interesting to listen to is how you can hear the band wrestling with identity, grief, and the underlying feeling that the person you became is nothing but the lingering stench of decay of everything that hurt you. However painful to hear, there is a sense of growth here. Not in the sense of someone restraining themselves from uncovering the pain, but in the willingness to lay bare what has come to this without metaphor, without armor.

“Wasted Angel,” “Evidence of Extinction,” and “Nothing Gathered” show more creative teeth and use of cinematic tension in these moments. Jagged, bleak, and beautifully melodic at points, these tracks combine the very best of what Boundaries is always good at: showing that there is a sense of clarity that lies in the darkness of chaos and a purpose behind mental collapse. Such moments are a great build-up to the album’s concluding moments, “Only Endless” and “Yearning the Unbeautiful After.” In many ways, these are the perfect end caps to what is already a very heavy record. A rush of quiet nostalgia and trembling moments, Yearning: The Unbeautiful After concludes, showing you’re still here, even if everything that once made you happy or whole is gone.

Yearning: The Unbeautiful After is a great, heavy album that names truths most would hide from: Survival isn’t meant to be poetic; sometimes it isn’t even meant to be cinematic. Sometimes it's not meant to feel like you’ve won any victories, nor is it meant to feel beautiful. Boundaries seem as if they want to live in that space for this album. Where healing sometimes feels like you are still failing. Where growth still sometimes stings like grief. Where yearning at times feels like the universe is punishing you. Boundaries knows all of this and still decides not to resolve the pain. They let it exist, breathe, and take a life of its own. That maybe through all of this, the hurt is the closest thing you feel to absolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlOGjjqxiAs