Your Spirit Dies - My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest

Happy 2026. I guarantee, however bad you thought 2025 was, 2026 is going to be way worse unless we do something about it. 2025 was pretty good for music, or so I'm told. I spent most of it knee deep in death metal and metalcore. Now that I'm in a heavy band, I need to know what the standard of brutality is so that we can surpass it. My AOTY was the album that gave me a window into metalcore's past, so that I may understand metalcore's present and future.

I was hipped to Your Spirit Dies by Heavy Blog. Through Your Spirit Dies, I learned about Unearth. Through Unearth, I gained a greater appreciation for the whole Northeast thing going on in the late 90s and early 00s; Killswitch Engage, All That Remains, Shadows Fall, It Dies Today, God Forbid. I could finally enjoy and understand the lineage of Swedish-style death metal and how it mutated in America to create melodic metalcore (A7X is still cop metal, though). I even found deathcore that didn't make me want to jump out of a moving car.

My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest is an Unearth-ass record. Every review of this album mentions Unearth; it's a comparison that Your Spirit Dies does not shy away from. They're also a shreddy metalcore band that emphasizes the metal over core while still delivering some of the nastiest breakdowns of the year. Hell, the album cover uses the same color palette as The Oncoming Storm, a corrupted sepia-toned image of a woman in prayer. Even so, this is not an entirely backwards-facing album. The production is much more modern than the bands they were inspired by, but not so modern as to be unlistenable on a bad speaker setup.

The most potent way to describe the guitar and bass tones on My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest is "zingy". The breakdown on "In the Depths of Grief" practically sounds like the a Sonic the Hedgehog bass synth. Bassist Keegan McChesney sits in the scoop of Holden Hall and Tyler Dorman's guitars, which are thick without being porky. . The album alternates between patches of songs that are straight-up death metal and songs that are more melodic metalcore influenced.

The album opens with two of its most dissonant tracks, deathcore "Trenches of Pain" and blackened d-beat "Serpentine". Track three, "A Rose for Every Stone", is where the melodic riffs start to blossom, with guitars exploring higher up the neck. That's not to say it's any less heavy. The breakdown is gnarly as hell, and the subsequent return to the chorus is beautiful. As much as the word has had all the meaning wrung out of it, this track is truly epic. The lyrical content on this record is way more swords & Satan than it is betrayal & beef - which is to say, this metalcore record leans more towards the metal than the core. That's just how I like it, personally.

Just going over a couple more of my favorites. "Shrouded in Silence" is a one riff song, nearly a one-note one-riff song, but what a goddamn riff! "A Snow in Summer" is a great horror-themed death metal song with some standout riffs and a great vocal feature from fellow Southern metalcore band No Cure. "Night Pierces My Bones" also has a feature from the Callous Daoboys, and it's what I'd call a Seton Hall pirate radio anthem (NJ metalheads will know what I mean). The only clean lead vocals that Brandon Byars does on this album are on "Unjust God", which is melodic metalcore at its finest. Otherwise, Byars growls and snarls with the fury of an caged animal, railing against false gods and lamenting lost moments.

"An Effigy of Failure" is the epic at the end of the album, which is to say, it's the graveyard of all the killer riffs that they weren't able to fit on the rest of the songs that they sewed together. There, the themes turn from abandonment, loss, hate, and hell towards hope. The hope for a new world, moving on from perceived past failures. "Dread has no grip on me/I will not falter/Despite the coming of tragedy/I fear death no longer". That's the attitude with which we must all face this new year. Grim, angry, hopeful, defiant.

My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest by Your Spirit Dies is a good album, and I like it.