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. 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 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.

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