Demon Hunter - Outlive

I found out about Demon Hunter in sort of one of the old, classic ways of finding about about them: word of mouth via a couple of people I knew, followed by taking the risk of buying a CD of theirs in hopes that it would be a lucky gamble. The year was 2010, the album was The World Is a Thorn, and the musical dice rolled to my favor. Now it’s 2017 and things have slowly gotten a little different for Demon Hunter.

In my 7 years or so of listening to more of the band’s work and hearing the follow-up releases to the album that got me into them (True Defiance in 2012 and Extremist in 2014), The World Is a Thorn remains my favorite album because it really epitomizes all the qualities the band had been developing in their previous work, which was not really that comparatively primitive either. The World Is a Thorn finds Demon Hunter in the sweet spot they had been feeling for in their career and making the most out of their abilities as a band. Their follow-up album in 2012 definitely showed that they knew they were where they needed to be and doing something they were great at, albeit, not quite as well as they had done 2 years earlier in my opinion. But those two records are so similar in what they offer, I would understand if people favored the latter for similar reasons to mine for favoring the former. 2014 was when things started to get a little bit shaky for me, with Extremist. On that album the band had begun to incorporate a few new electronic sounds, not heavily, but noticeably, into their music and had focused more on the melodic aspect of their sound, specifically emphasizing Ryan Clark’s clean vocals. Strangely, it still ended up being a diverse and, what I would still consider, strong album in its own light (even on par with True Defiance). What worried me about Extremist was the potential direction it could push Demon Hunter in, the potentially generic clean-singing-heavy alternative metal sound that they sort of tried on for size on that album that I hoped they wouldn’t double down on.

On Outlive, my fears were somewhat realized, unfortunately, not as badly as they could have been, but it is in a few ways what I was hoping Demon Hunter would not do and for me it’s one of the most patchy releases of their now 8-album catalog. The album starts off with some considerable strength with it’s two opening tracks, “Jesus Wept” being probably one of the most killer songs on the album with its straightforward groove metal assault. It’s actually pretty indicative of what the dynamic of the rest of the album ends up providing, and that is a plethora of attempts at super melodic alternative metal songs that showcase Ryan’s singing with much less balancing by significantly heavier parts with a lot fewer direct powerhouse headbangers tossed in for good measure. The fact that these few distortion churners like “Cold Blood” go over better than the bulk of the more melodic songs on here like “Died in My Sleep” shows that Demon Hunter’s strength has a great foundation in their ability to make compelling and very heavy music. Their application of their writing in such abundance to this more melodic style of theirs really makes it seem like it’s done more effectively on a few songs per album and aided by some metalcore brutality. Its dominant presence over the perhaps token heavy songs kind of perhaps suggests that those heavy songs exist on the album partially out of sheer obligation of sorts, just something to check that box on their list.
I don’t think this movement towards this more melodically-focused sound is Demon Hunter hopping on some trend, but maybe a bit of an effort to widen their appeal. I think simply disrupting the balance of what they’ve been doing, though, hasn’t done anything productive for their music and the identity they present to their fans and potential fans. Personally, I think they showed a perfectly flattering form of themselves on The World Is a Thorn that reached out in plenty of directions and got me to buy the thing just hearing about it. Outlive isn’t an unenjoyable experience and it’s not something that destroys my trust in Demon Hunter; I am still going to be following them and I’ll probably be excited for the next album they announce, I’ll probably just have to hope for a continued presence of their vital heaviness if they don’t give any indication of their altering their trajectory rather than the artisianally balanced consistency that got me into their music.