Band:	The Lion's Daughter
Album:	Skin Show
Style:	Hardcore, Blackened sludge metal
Release date:	April 2021

01. Become The Night
02. Curtains
03. Neon Teeth
04. Dead In Dreams
05. Werewolf Hospital
06. Sex Trap
07. Snakeface
08. All Hell Is Mine
09. Skin Show
10. The Chemist

If you take a sharp turn, you'd better stick with it.

The first time I came upon The Lion's Daughter, they were a sludge band, the kind with a lot of black and hardcore edges, and with an amazing cover art for Existence Is Horror. As great of a sludge metal album as it was, there wasn't much there to differentiate TLD from all the other dime a dozen sludge bands. When Future Cult, I had fond memories of Existence Is Horror, but that album took such a surprising turn that I had to review it. So basically, they kept the core of the blackened hardcore sludge, but drowned in dark horror synth, made the songwriting more direct, and struck upon such a weird blend that it could run by the momentum of the originality alone. I mentioned in my review that the blend between the sludge and the synths isn't as seamless as it could be, and I hoped they would improve upon it with future releases. Skin Show is the first of those.

The mix of styles became a bit more even here, with the synths taking an even larger part of the sound, bringing with them touches of synthwave, gothic rock, industrial rock, which in turn make the sludge go either into something more direct and catchy in the vein of early 00s hard rock, or more bass-heavy and noisy. So for the namedropping section of the review, it's like John Carpenter meets The Sisters Of Mercy meets Nine Inch Nails meets early Mastodon. The vocals are still gruffy as one would expect from a sludge band, but here they act like a bigger anchor into how heavy the songs stay. The guitars feel overall less heavy, mostly because the riffs are less interested in being heavy, but in either providing atmosphere, or a sense of moving.

This is a big strength of the album, striking a balance of the "horror soundtrack" part, made evident by either the gothy-er or the synthy-er moments, and the "PS2 racing game soundtrack ones" that are more in the melodic sludge direction. Somehow, these two don't go head to head, even if this album is also not really there in terms of having a completely cohesive mix of genres. But it seems like it took an even bigger step than Future Cult, and also did it better. They found an appealing sound, one that is fairly unique, and they're going with it. And I don't think it would've worked as well if it was someone else doing it. I wouldn't mind some extra releases in their old blackened style, but this is the sound that struck gold.

This is the kind of album that made you wish you found a good horror movie to go along with it.