If you are regular festival and gig-goer then chances are you’ve stumbled across Defences on your travels. Hailing from Hertfordshire, this quintet are surely one of metal’s hardest working acts and aside from putting the roadwork, they also have two albums and a couple of EP’s under their collective belt. Long player number three finds the band consolidating their signature sound whilst incorporating new textures and Shadowlight should propel the band into metal’s top tier.
Now signed to Long Branch Records, a new label and the change in dynamic which that brings seems to have galvanised the band and after the briefest of introductions get straight down to business with the bombastic. Evidencing a great maturity, the band make good use of opposites to deliver a track (and, indeed, album) that fractures sound in different directions like light reflected on a diamond. Loud passages nestle next to the quiet, gruff vocals contrast the clean while an almost pop sensibility sits alongside crushing metal. Without veering into eclecticism, the band pull of these strands together into a cohesive whole and part of this album’s charm is never knowing in what guise the band will appear next.
While Defences haven’t disowned their metal past, there seems to be a consensus with this release that nothing is out of bounds. It has given the band an exorbitant amount of freedom, but with that comes a responsibility not to alienate their core fanbase and Shadowlight walks that fine line between pleasing themselves as artists and sating their fans and ‘Breathe It In’ will acts as a magnet to attract new admirers while ‘The Almost’ is a pit ready anthem that should cause mayhem wherever it is released.
It’s sounds as if tracks such as ‘Greatness’ have been written for the biggest stages and you can see the band banging out this beauty on Download’s main stage as the crowd go suitably nuts. In fact, at the end of every festival the burning question (that seems to get more urgent every year) is who will replace the establish acts as they shuffle off into the sunset. If they play their cards right, Defences could just be that band.
- Shadowlight is released via Long Branch Records on 8th November 2024.
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Track List:
- The Curse
- Gold In The Dark
- Perish
- Ego(Maniac)
- Silence & The Sound
- Breathe It In
- Inspirit
- Almost
- Greatness
- Shadowlight
