You’d think with my love of deathcore and especially Australian deathcore bands like A Night in Texas, Thy Art is Murder, Aversions Crown, Babirusa, and even going back to early Make Them Suffer, Signal The Firing Squad, and The Red Shore, I’d have at least some deeper love for Sydney’s vegan militants, To The Grave. But the truth is, other than dabbling with 2023’s Director’s Cuts (I liked the song “Red Dot Sight” on Spotify), they have truly passed me by for some reason.
Well, after being out a month or so, I randomly heard a song on a Spotify playlist, and it piqued my interest enough to check out the whole album — their 6th, and holy fuck, this is killer stuff.
While mired in the more recent symphonic/blackened deathcore explosion, only a few recent OG, plain old deathcore releases have got me going: Whitechapel’s return-to-form album from last year, Larcenia Roe‘s gnarly 2025 effort Extraction, and Crown Magnetar‘s bruising latest album from earlier this year, and the new Rev3rent (album I’m sure the upcoming Suicide Silence will rule too), and if you too enjoyed those releases, Liberation Front should be right up your alley. Heck, I’d venture to say I might even put this slightly above Crown Magnetar‘s The Hollowing of Godflesh!
Liberation Front is tangibly, palpably, and murderously bludgeoning. Every note and bellow from frontman Dane Evans (who is every bit as vocally imposing as Phil Bozeman and Dan Tucker) absolutely seethes with rage against animal cruelty, meat-related cruelty, and other anti-religious, sociopolitical, and vegan hot topics.
Straight from the opener “Meat the Humans”, it’s fucking go time with some of the heaviest pure deathcore I’ve heard in a while. And not the sort of synthetically heavy, over-processed, super downtuned, over-the-top heavy like, say, Tsalmaveth PA or Nitheful (whom I like); this is still a physically organic, menacing, disturbing, make you grind your teeth, get ready to fucking fight heavy.
Tracks like “Nail Mary”, “Torture Porn”, “Eyestalk Ablations”, or the disgusting lope “Limb From Lamb” are ultra heavy deathcore with ample blast beats hammering double bass grooves (“Calf Slicer”, “Life Among the Septics”, “You Know The Drill” for example), and of course, plenty of super devastating breakdowns.
And in giving the 5 prior albums a cursory listen, it’s clear this is by far their heaviest, nastiest effort, as only Director’s Cuts comes close, even the album after that, Everybody is a Murderer, isn’t close, seeming to take a step back from Director’s Cuts. And they dropped any metalcore stylings, shouted vocals and such from their earlier work. Liberation Front is simply fucking brutal.
A few subtle keyboards do pop up here and there in “Nail Mary”, “Eyestalk Ablations”, “Calf Slicer”, “Terrorfire”, “You Know The Drill”, and the album closer “The World is a Slaughterhouse,” which also brings some surprising emotionality to the otherwise fucking pummeling material that has me wondering how and why the band suddenly got this brutal and truly upped their savagery between Everybody is a Murderer and Liberation Front.
