Band:	Frontierer
Album:	Unloved
Style:	Djent, Mathcore
Release date:	July 2018

01. Tumoric
02. Gower St.
03. Fluorescent Nights
04. Designer Chemtrails
05. Glitcher
06. Heartless 101
07. The Destruction Artist
08. Unloved & Oxidized
09. Bombgnasher
10. Electric Gag
11. The Sound Of The Dredge In Deathcount Woods
12. Neon Barnacle
13. Darkside Moonstroll
14. Reprogrammed Dawn

WARNING! Frontierer are in possession of the most powerful explosive ever devised by man.

Those of you who survived Orange Mathematics in 2015 should already be familiar with Frontierer and be either looking for more or avoiding it like the plague. Those unfamiliar with Frontierer might remember me reviewing Sectioned's new album, Sectioned being mastermind Pedram Valiani's other band. They both play some sort of mathcore.

While the two bands aren't exactly identical, the ethos of uncompromising destruction is present in both. What Frontierer does better is infuse doses of bassy djent and violent, glitchy electronics (there's plenty of those) to make the flavour of this city-leveler more interesting instead of just straightforward. What Sectioned does better is make sure to avoid overkill. Clocking in at nearly an hour and with really no moments to breathe (unless you're still alive by "Heartless 101"), Unloved is quite difficult to make it through in one listen. If that's your thing, kudos to you, but I've always felt that violent doses of destruction are in danger of providing overdoses. In music's case, overdoses don't lead to death; they lead to disinterest. Unloved is slightly more diverse and with a more well-adjusted flow than its predecessor, but when the latter dropped, no one knew what they were getting into. Now, the surprise is spilled, and I'd rather have the same quality in a package that doesn't feel like an endurance test.

Getting that out of the way, I don't want you to think that Unloved is a bad or boring album, just that its dosage should've been adjusted - for what it attempts to do, it does well. The chaos itself is clearly written with intent in mind instead of just random improvisation. While this gives little room for humane feelings in the music, instead feeling more robotic and precise, this is exactly the sound you'd want to feel from a weapon of mass destruction. The music, although always extreme, doesn't linger too much in the same pace or on the same riffs. Despite the metalcore and djent elements, at its core, Unloved is still mathcore, so there is a lot of complexity in the songwriting that is worth paying attention to. "Heartless 101" also features a few members of Car Bomb to make matters more interesting, and it is also here where we get mellower moments and Unloved becomes more than just a continuation of Orange Mathematics.

Remember the days when hardcore EPs were 7 minutes long and LPs would barely scratch 20? Yeah, that's a bit of an exaggeration in the opposite. I may be putting too much emphasis on this one point - Frontierer aren't Autechre - but Unloved's length is the only thing that is keeping it unloved for me. Other than that, it's got that vital feral vitriol.