Hatebreed

The Divinity Of Purpose, Hatebreed’s sixth studio album, stays nail-gunned to the carpentry that built the band’s demolition style albums like Rise Of Brutality, but there is still a hand-built muscle that shows the band can still beat a steel girder as flat as sheet metal.

Launching in, The Divinity Of Purpose feels a tad stripped down, but still highly effective like a dune buggy at full throttle. “Put It To The Torch” wastes no time throwing the listener straight into the mosh pit with choppy speed guitar and motor rattling drums—the same fuel mixture that burns throughout the album.

“Fists up, heads high/We own the fucking world tonight/One flame can light a million,” is scream chanted in “Own Your World,” getting the listener amped in the driver’s seat, but it seems like a song that would work better at a concert, than blasting from a stereo. Hatebreed fulfills a sense of metal community with words like “we own” and “one flame,” and promotes simultaneous physical aggression with actions like ‘fists up’.

Still tightly wound at 10 songs, Hatebreed screams volumes with side piercing lyrics on “Bitter Truth,” “The stories written in our eye/I’d rather suffer from the truth/Than prosper from a lie,” which encapsulates an ongoing metal lifestyle philosophy bands have been advocating for decades.

In all its frenzied finality, The Divinity Of Purpose will have the fingers of listeners ripping open cans of beer and chugging the boiled brew in seconds flat in between sessions of long hair whipping in circles until passing out from exhaustion.