Abandoned By Bears – The Years Ahead

This is the superbly named Abandoned By Bears first release since they signed for Victory Records, The Years Ahead follows on from the 2014 EP, When Nothing Goes Right, Go Left and this is the Swedish easycore quintet’s debut full length. Easycore usually represents the melding of two seeminlgly disparate genre’s, metalcore, or pick your own core to go there, and the poppier end of punk, so what can we expect from Abandoned By Bears?

Abandoned by Bears do indeed possess all the hallmarks of pop punk, but with one key difference, the bouncy melodies are played hard, fast and brutally, this contrasts nicely with the vocals, the majority of which are harmony led pop punk vocals, in particular the break downs in the songs are heavyweight punches to the gut. It might seem an odd combination but it works, the guitars rarely reach thrash metal levels and neither do they cross the line from punk into pop. There is a fair share of growling vocals in the heavier sections, but Abandoned By Bears manage to flit seamlessly between the metalcore approach and the pop punk harmonies, how much you find that appealing will depend on how much you enjoy the noisier cores that metal and punk have spawned over the years.

My problem with The Years Ahead, and with a lot of pop punk inspired releases, is that I find the tracks start to blur into each other after a while. The relentless pummelling drums and crunching guitars are omnipresent throughout the album, similarly the switch between harmony pop punk vocals and deep metal growls become almost interchangeable. Abandoned By Bears do what they do, and they do it very well, but for me this a hybrid that doesn’t quite gel. I found that The Years Ahead doesn’t quite hit the highs, and it falls short of what either of the genre’s that informed their sound is capable of.

The Years Ahead can be ordered from Victory Records here