It Is Going To Get Dark

It Is Going To Get Dark makes its promise immediately: this is music built around impact, pressure and bodily discomfort. No Cure fuse hardcore punk and metalcore into a compact thirty-three minutes that rarely loosens its grip. The record’s identity is unmistakable, but its emotional range is narrower than its physical force.

“When The Spasms Cease” opens with a sense of instability, setting up the album’s fixation on breakdown, collapse and control. “Oblivion Crusade” and “Brain Matter Displacement” push the rhythm section to the front, using blunt repetition as a weapon. The drumming feels designed to drive the listener into the floor, while the guitars favour mass over detail. This directness gives the early tracks real power.

The album hits hard enough to bruise, but repetition gradually turns punishment into predictability.

“Slowly Turning Blue” introduces a colder atmosphere and briefly suggests a wider palette. “Ironclad” follows with one of the record’s strongest combinations of groove and momentum, proving that No Cure are most effective when the riffs move rather than simply strike. “Starved In Sanctuary (My Hands Are In Your Chest Cavity)” is the album at its most grotesque, but the title’s extremity is more memorable than the song’s internal development.

The second half becomes increasingly constrained by the same methods. “My World In Flames” and “Convulsing In The Dark” sustain the hostility, yet their structures blur together. “Sharpen The Blade” restores some focus through a tighter central riff, while “Purity Spiral” adds a more obsessive quality to the repetition. “I Am Still Fucking Straight Edge” is direct to the point of manifesto, but its certainty leaves little room for tension or contradiction.

“Everything I Love Is Dead Or Dying” closes on a more vulnerable premise, though the music remains largely within the album’s established physical language. That mismatch is revealing. No Cure have intensity, conviction and a clear identity, but not yet enough variation to make every blow distinct. It Is Going To Get Dark is forceful, coherent and exhausting; whether that exhaustion feels cathartic or merely repetitive will depend on how much punishment the listener wants.