Sounds Fresh, but Look Closer

156/Silence sounds like a band pulling older metalcore ideas into the present without simply dressing them up in nostalgia. The guitars are angular. The harsh and clean vocals fight for space instead of politely taking turns. The hooks are huge. The breakdowns hit with real urgency. For a while, it feels like the band has found exactly the right balance between what made older metalcore exciting and what makes the modern version of the genre work.

Then the cracks start to show.  The longer the record goes, the more familiar some of those ideas begin to feel. What initially sounds fresh slowly reveals the same machinery that has become impossible to ignore across modern metalcore: pristine production, oversized payoffs, one-note chugs, electronic swells, and songs that sometimes feel built around creating a moment rather than something cohesive.

That does not make From A Distance bad.  In some ways, it makes the record more frustrating.  At its best, 156/Silence sounds like a band that understands exactly how to make modern metalcore feel alive. At its weakest, they sound like another band submitting to the same habits that have made so much of the genre increasingly interchangeable.  That tension is all over the record.

The breakdowns are heavy, urgent, and undeniably effective, but at times that effectiveness starts to feel automatic. The notorious one-note chug can still turn a room upside down, but when it becomes the default vocabulary rather than the punctuation, the impact starts to flatten. A breakdown should feel like the floor suddenly disappeared beneath the song. Too often in modern metalcore, it feels like the floor was removed according to schedule.

The production creates a similar problem.  Technically, the record sounds excellent. Everything is enormous. Every instrument sits where it should. The vocals cut through. The guitars hit hard. The low end is controlled. Nothing is accidental.  And that is exactly where some of the personality gets lost.

Metalcore has always benefited from ugliness. Not bad production. Ugliness. The scrape of a guitar that feels slightly out of control. Vocals that sound like somebody is actually straining to get the words out. Drums that feel physical instead of mathematically perfect. The sense that the song might fall apart if everyone pushes just a little harder.

From A Distance has plenty of aggression, but the production occasionally compresses that ugliness until the chaos feels contained. The result is heavy music that sounds powerful without always sounding dangerous.  That difference matters.  Modern metalcore has become obsessed with creating moments.  The enormous clean chorus.  The electronic swell.  The pause before the breakdown.  The one riff designed to make the crowd explode.  The scream that exists because it will look good clipped into a fifteen-second video.

None of those things are inherently bad. In fact, when they work together naturally, they are part of what makes the genre so much fun. The problem comes when the song starts to feel like connective tissue between those moments.

That is where Swept from Under (Call of the Void) succeeds so completely.  It has almost every element that makes modern metalcore work when the formula is firing correctly. Angular guitars create tension instead of simply filling space. The harsh and clean vocals create a real push and pull. The hook is massive without neutering the aggression around it. The breakdowns are huge, but they feel like they belong to the song rather than being dropped into it because the structure demands one.  It is not great because it avoids the conventions of modern metalcore.  It is great because it understands how to use them.  That distinction is important.

The frustrating part is that From A Distance proves very early that 156/Silence knows exactly how to bridge old and new. The record just does not always stay on that bridge.

Order and Entropy represents the album's other side.  The electronics move too far forward, and the song begins to feel less like a cohesive piece of music and more like an attempt to manufacture increasingly large moments. The issue is not electronics themselves. Metalcore has been using electronics, atmosphere, and synthetic textures effectively for decades. The issue is whether those elements expand the song or distract from the fact that the song underneath them is not doing enough. This presents the album’s biggest problem: inconsistency.

Some songs here absolutely scratch the itch. There are moments where 156/Silence sounds capable of taking the best instincts of older metalcore, abrasion, urgency, tension, ugliness, and merging them with the scale and polish of the modern sound.  Then another song arrives and leans directly into the same common bullshit the genre has been repeating for years.  That inconsistency is more frustrating than outright failure because the ceiling is obvious.

A bad record can simply be dismissed. From A Distance keeps showing flashes of something better. It keeps proving how effective this band can be when the song comes first and the moment follows naturally. Then it goes searching for the moment again. That is why the record gradually becomes less memorable than the opening impression suggests. It never really stops being enjoyable. It never becomes difficult to listen to. The performances are strong, the production is massive, the hooks work, and the heavy parts hit exactly where they are supposed to hit.  At some point, the initial reaction of “this feels fresh” shifts to “oh, I have heard this before.”  The same collection of modern metalcore characteristics rearranged into another technically impressive package.  And once that feeling sets in, it becomes difficult to unhear.

Unfortunately, that says as much about the filler as it does about the highlights.  A fantastic EP is hiding inside this album.  That is probably the most accurate way to describe From A Distance. There is enough here to show that 156/Silence understands where metalcore came from and can push those ideas forward. It also shows how easy it is for even a talented band to fall into the genre's safest modern habits.

At its best, From A Distance sounds like 156/Silence dragging old metalcore into the present without losing its teeth. At its worst, it sounds like the present dragging 156/Silence toward everyone else.  The record is polished, heavy, and extremely listenable.  It is also frustratingly forgettable.