Band:	Chamber (USA)
Album:	A Love To Kill For
Style:	Mathcore, Hardcore, Metalcore
Release date:	July 2023

01. Chamber
02. Retribution
03. At My Hands
04. Tremble
05. To Die In The Grip Of Poison [feat. Matt McDougal]
06. One Final Sacrifice
07. We Followed You To The Bitter End
08. Our Beauty Decayed, Nothing Was Left
09. Devoured [feat. Matt Honeycutt]
10. When Deliverance Comes
11. Mirror
12. Cyanide Embrace
13. A Love To Kill For
14. Hopeless Portrait

The disbandment of The Dillinger Escape Plan has left a slight void in the world of mathcore; there’s still Car Bomb and Frontierer unleashing frenetic violence, but with some other acts in the genre consigned to history (Botch, The Locust, The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza), there’s space for new acts to shine. Acts, for example, such as Chamber (USA).

A Love To Kill For is the second release from the Nashville 5-piece, who describe their style on Bandcamp as ‘psychotic mosh metal’. This album isn’t mathcore through and through (although, being realistic, I’m not sure any album out there is capable of being mathcore 100% of the time), with songs and passages that more closely resemble hardcore or metalcore, but the three styles offer equally belligerent aggression, so the end result here is unsurprisingly explosive.

Despite there being 14 tracks on the album, A Love To Kill For clocks in at under 29 minutes; the double-header of the 12-second Dillinger microcosm “We Followed You To The Bitter End” and 25-second breakdown-in-a-song “Our Beauty Decayed, Nothing Was Left” obviously play a role in that equation, but the remaining 12 tracks certainly don’t hang around for long, with the four-minute title track comfortably the longest here. With such a concise runtime, there’s little time to loiter, and Chamber kick off the album with a 1-minute eponymous song that very much sets the tone, jumping frantically between chaotic mathcore riffs, dazzling guitar runs, and beatdown pummellings.

After that point, some songs veer more towards metalcore heft (“Retribution”, “All My Hands”), while others let loose all the technical wizardry that Chamber (USA) have in their arsenal, such as “Tremble” and “Devoured”. Each approach has its own appeal; “All My Hands” has a solid balance of pounding, mid-tempo bulldozing and faster-paced groove, along with an air of menacing atmosphere during a drum-driven break midway through. In contrast, “Tremble” jumps around on a second-to-second basis, but still squeezes in segments during which one can let loose for some of that psychotic moshing.

If there’s one thing that currently keeps Chamber (USA) at a tier below the elite in mathcore, particularly The Dillinger Escape Plan, it’s a lack of tonal range; they don’t need to have Dillinger’s propensity towards wackiness (or, later in their career, balladry), but with just relentless viciousness, it does make it harder for tracks here to truly stand out, or for A Love To Kill For to connect at a higher level. The more brooding passages in the likes of “All My Hands”, “Tremble” and “When Deliverance Comes”, however brief they are, offer something that can be explored further in future efforts, but it’s only towards the end of the album where a little something extra begins to emerge, with the out-of-nowhere guitar solo on “Cyanide Embrace” and the ominous, atmospheric climax to the title track.

Still, it took bands like Dillinger and Rolo Tomassi a few albums to expand and round out their respective unique sounds, and Chamber (USA) have the fundamental building blocks firmly locked down here; the jagged mathcore dazzles, the riffs get you moving and the breakdowns/beatdowns demand recognition. If you’ve been waiting restlessly for a new mathcore album to grab you by the scruff of the neck, this could be it.