Feet planted firmly at the nexus of doomy sludge metal and hardcore-blasted noise rock, the veteran Los Angelites deliver another black eye of a record with
Dream Squasher
, their eighth full-length effort and the follow-up to 2016's equally punishing
Lifespan of a Moth
. The departure of co-founder and lead vocalist
Cris Jerue
, who left the group ahead of the album's release but appears sporadically throughout, hasn't dampened
16
's abrasive sound and nihilistic spirit. Guitarist
Bobby Ferry
, also a founding member, takes over vocal duties and proves he's more than capable of matching
Jerue
's tonsil-tearing delivery, but it's his occasional detours into clean-ish singing that mark the most significant change for the band, as least dynamically. Commencing with the strident "Candy in Spanish" and the groove-laden "Me and the Dog Die Together,"
treads familiar sonic ground early on. The arrival of the slow-burning "Sadlands," a bluesy
Sabbath
-esque dirge replete with fat '70s organ textures, sees
Ferry
adopt a doomy croon that feels more aligned with melody-forward noisemakers like
the Sword
and
Mastodon
than it does the sharp-edged crust punk of
Eyehategod
. The bruising "Acid Tongue" and "Agora (Killed by a Mountain Lion)" follow suit, pairing lumbering beats and tornadic guitars with
's medium-grit sandpaper wails. Elsewhere, the blazing "Ride the Waves" looks to classic SoCal punk for inspiration, while the nightmarish "Harvester of Fabrication" and the fractured "Screw Unto Others" distill the band's multiple decades of sonic malevolence into bitter three-minute chunks of ruthless causticity. ~ James Christopher Monger