Weight of the False Self

Weight of the False Self, released by Nuclear Blast on 27 November 2020, is Hatebreed's eighth album and the third since the move to that label, arriving four and a half years after The Concrete Confessional. From the opening "Instinctive (Slaughterlust)" to the closing "Invoking Dominance", twelve songs hold their speed and their pressure without a break. Hatebreed albums have been built on one design for over twenty years — songs of two to three minutes, made of riff, shout and mosh part, with nothing decorative left in — and this is that design at its most concentrated. The title song is about the weight of continuing to perform a self that is not yours. As titles like "Set It Right (Start with Yourself)", "This I Earned" and "Dig Your Way out" suggest, the lyrics stay fixed on self-responsibility and on recovery under your own power. The anger points inward as exhortation rather than outward as blame, and that has been the spine of this band's writing for a long time. "A Stroke of Red", "Wings of the Vulture" and "From Gold to Gray" place their shifts of tempo and texture carefully enough to keep the record from flattening. It can sound like the same thing repeated; in fact the centre of gravity moves song by song, and that is what the band's endurance is actually made of.