Brutus burn with blistering intensity on Unison Life

Skip to any random part of the album and, chances are, you’ll be hit with what sounds like the final chorus of the final song, on the last night of the tour.

Since 2014, the Belgian trio have built a steady and dedicated following with their ferocious brand of post-everything heavy music but Unison Life cranks up the intensity further than ever, barely coming up for air across its run time. It’s electrifying and exhausting in equal measure. While it’s possible to parse influences ranging from basement bar hardcore, to austere post-metal, to skate-rat punk, Brutus never linger on one style long enough to be defined by it. Instead, they appear to channel the essence of those influences, mining them for the potent energy that propels them.

The fact that Unison Life plays out as cohesively as it does is testament to the band’s sense of quality control, but it’s also in large parts thanks to the unifying effect of drummer Stefanie Mannaert’s vocals, which command an extraordinary amount of power in the context of Brutus’ sound. Mannaerts’ vocals are mostly sung, with lashings of raw heat that never fully break into full-throated screams, but they’re no less visceral for it.

While her lyrics have a tendency towards the vague and angsty, her performance does most of the heavy lifting in the tone it conveys. Mannaerts’ voice sounds like it’s constantly at the edge of its limits, and depending on the context of the song it communicates overlapping shades of desperation, hopefulness, and rage. An interesting lyrical pattern emerges over the course of the record as the words “never change” and “stay the same” appear as a refrain across multiple songs. Mannaerts is preoccupied with the concept of change, but we find her variously resisting it, accepting it, or willing it into being. Each of these states feel simultaneously similar and wildly conflicting as her fiery delivery subtly shifts in its emphasis. On “Victoria,” she clings onto the idea that “some things never change” with hope and gratefulness, charting the friendships and family connections that have remained constant while everything else changes around her. By contrast, on the unrelenting “Dust,” Mannaerts’ “I’ll never change” is a defiant cry of resistance against the overbearing expectations of the people around her.

Mannaerts’ impassioned vocals feed into the relentlessness of Unison Life just as much as the frenetic musical arrangements. And yet, Brutus’ greatest strength is also a weakness: with their pedal firmly to the floor, they leave themselves with nowhere higher to go. It’s not a complete absence of dynamic range – in fact, they repeatedly find genuine beauty in the record’s quieter moments (e.g. the opening passage of album closer “Desert Rain” offers a soft glimmer of hope in an album that’s otherwise short of it) – but more often than not these are fleeting, lasting only a few bars before the band ratchets back up to full intensity, denying us the time to reset and come back down to earth.

Brutus have said that for Unison Life, they “wanted every song to feel like the last song we’ll ever write.” If that was the ambition, they’ve surely succeeded; and for fans and new listeners alike, let’s hope these aren’t the last songs – that this isn’t really the end.