One chaotic death.

 Living Weapon have been lurking in Boston’s metallic hardcore world since their 2021 Paradise EP, but Death In The Family is where the project really feels like a fully realized monster. The band’s current lineup pulls together Jonathan Lhaubouet, Jeremy Martin, Anthony DiDio, Josian Soto-Ramos, and Justin Legere, with Martin handling the recording and production before Taylor Young mixed it and Nick Townsend mastered it. The nine-song album runs only about 23 minutes, which turns out to be a huge advantage because Living Weapon pack an absurd amount of information into that short runtime. Instead of giving you one long stretch of metallic hardcore, they keep snapping between mathcore, metalcore, chaotic hardcore, extreme-metal riffing, digital noise, and ugly low-end without ever completely losing the physical impact that makes the music work.

“The First Element” wastes absolutely no time establishing that mindset. Frantic guitars, deep drums, distorted textures, and low vocals immediately create the feeling that the song is trying to tear itself apart before it has even properly started. The guitars sound almost mangled at points, but the rhythm underneath them is much more deliberate than it first appears. There are little rhythmic shifts constantly happening inside the chaos, and that gives the song a sense of motion rather than making it sound like random noise. The distorted backing vocals and strange electronic touches make everything feel even more hostile, while the drums keep punching through with enough force to stop the song from becoming a purely experimental exercise.

“Metastasis” pushes that intensity even further, with sharper snare hits, frantic bass, and riffs that seem to move in several directions at once. The bass distortion is one of the most interesting parts of the record because it doesn't simply add thickness to the guitar. It becomes part of the abrasion, almost buzzing against the rest of the arrangement. The layered vocals also add to that feeling of everything collapsing inward, but the song never completely loses its rhythmic center. Living Weapon understand that chaos is much more effective when there is a groove underneath it, and that idea becomes one of the strongest threads running through the album.

“Dead Like You” is where the band start getting seriously weird. Glitchy sounds appear before the full instrumental assault, and the guitars sound like they're being dragged through some kind of broken machine. The low vocals have a genuinely demonic quality, but what really caught me was the way the track slows down without actually losing its menace. The middle section becomes strangely depressing before the band return to the violence, while bit-crushed drums and sliding guitar noises make the whole thing feel unstable. That willingness to let a song become uncomfortable rather than simply heavier is a big part of what separates Living Weapon from more straightforward metallic hardcore.

“The Leaving Process” feels more structured by comparison, but that doesn't mean it is any less aggressive. The song finds a better balance between groove and disorientation, with heavy guitar patterns and rhythmic shifts constantly pushing the track forward. This is probably one of the clearest examples of the band taking the controlled-chaos idea and turning it into an actual hook. The riffs are easier to latch onto, but they still have enough strange movement around them to keep things from settling into a predictable pattern. It makes sense that this was chosen as an early introduction to the album, because it gives you a decent map of how Living Weapon operate before the record gets even stranger.

“Parthenogenesis” is the obvious left turn. Rather than functioning like another conventional hardcore or metal song, it leans heavily into glitchy, digitized textures and an instrumental arrangement that feels almost disconnected from traditional riff writing. The drums and electronics interact in strange ways, and the whole thing feels closer to a malfunctioning machine than a normal song. It is also the kind of track that could easily become irritating if it went on too long, but Living Weapon keep it compact. At just over two minutes, it manages to add an entirely different texture to the record without derailing the pacing.

“Interspecies Quality Assessment” brings the guitars back into the center with deeper chugs and a slower groove before eventually exploding into faster drums and increasingly distorted guitar work. This is where the production becomes especially impressive. Even with multiple layers fighting for space, the instruments remain distinguishable enough that you can follow what the players are doing. That clarity matters because the musicianship is a huge part of the appeal. You can hear the band making all kinds of little rhythmic decisions underneath the main riff, which gives the song more replay value than a straightforward breakdown-driven track.

“Qui Transtulit Sustinet” pushes further toward death-metal and black-metal territory, particularly through the aggressive drumming and strange guitar patterns. It has a more sinister quality than some of the earlier songs, but the track still carries that unmistakable Living Weapon sense of instability. The riffs never sit still for very long, and the vocals seem to be constantly shifting between different textures. Instead of feeling like genre experimentation for the sake of being able to say the album has more influences, the changes contribute to the overall feeling of unease.

“In Loving Memory” then strips everything down into something slower and much darker. The bass becomes the center of gravity, the drums sit at a crawl, and the distorted guitars create this enormous wall of pressure. It's one of the shortest songs on the album, but it feels much larger than its runtime because the band allow every note to hang in the air. The track doesn't need frantic percussion to feel violent. The low-end weight alone creates a sense that something horrible is about to happen.

Then “When No Light Compared” closes the record by bringing nearly every part of Living Weapon’s personality back together. There is a more traditional metallic-hardcore structure underneath the chaos, but the guitars keep becoming stranger as the song progresses, while the drums and low end continue building pressure. The added guitar layer around the middle of the track is a particularly effective moment because it creates a sudden sense of scale without sounding overly theatrical. The ending then falls apart into bit-crushed drums, feedback, and strange synthetic noise rather than giving you a neat resolution. That feels completely appropriate. Other coverage has similarly picked out the track as the album’s most fully developed and comparatively traditional song before it eventually collapses into noise.

What makes Death In The Family so effective is that the chaos has structure underneath it. This is not a band randomly throwing mathcore riffs, blast beats, electronics, and breakdowns into a blender and hoping something interesting comes out. There is a clear understanding of pacing. Fast sections become more effective because they are surrounded by slower ones. The uglier guitar passages stand out because the band occasionally gives you melody. The digital textures feel more unsettling because they are placed around physical drums and bass rather than replacing them.

The drums are probably the most ridiculous part of the entire performance. There are constant fills, sudden rhythmic changes, bursts of speed, blast beats, and precise accents that make the songs feel almost impossible to predict. Yet the playing never comes across as pure technical flexing. It always serves the violence of the music. The bass is just as important because that distorted low end gives the record its physical center. Even when the guitars get completely fucked up with noise and strange rhythms, the bass keeps dragging the songs back toward something you can actually move to.

The vocals fit perfectly inside that world. The delivery is deep, ugly, and aggressive, but there is enough variation between lows, harsher screams, layered parts, and processed voices to stop the album from becoming one continuous growl. The production also treats the vocals as another texture rather than simply placing them cleanly over the top. That works because Living Weapon are clearly interested in atmosphere as much as impact.

The biggest strength, though, is the amount of detail packed into such a short record. At around 23 minutes, Death In The Family gives you no opportunity to get comfortable. Songs bleed into strange transitions, sounds appear from nowhere, riffs mutate halfway through, and sections end before you've completely figured out what just happened. That gives the album an unusually high replay value because there is always another little sound or rhythmic shift waiting to jump out at you.

There are a few moments where the experimentation threatens to become more interesting as an idea than as a song, particularly when the electronic elements become the dominant feature. But those sections are short enough that they never drag the record down. The more conventional tracks provide enough grounding that the weird ones feel like detours rather than dead ends.

I also like that Living Weapon don't seem interested in making their music easier to digest than it needs to be. There's no unnecessary chorus designed to give you a clean release after every chaotic section. There's no giant polished breakdown waiting at every turn. The band are comfortable letting songs remain uncomfortable, unresolved, or downright fucking strange.

That is especially effective considering the album's lyrical focus on mortality, loss, isolation, and the collapse of human connection. The title Death In The Family isn't just there because it sounds dark. The band's own material repeatedly circles around death, grief, and the feeling of being left behind, which gives the ugliness of the music more context. The closing lyrics in “When No Light Compared” make that particularly clear, turning the final stretch into something much more emotionally devastating than the instrumentation initially suggests.

Ultimately, Death In The Family feels like Living Weapon taking everything that worked on Paradise and making the idea much bigger without inflating the runtime. The band are still rooted in metallic hardcore, but they clearly have no interest in staying inside its standard boundaries. There is mathcore, death metal, black-metal texture, industrial noise, digital manipulation, and plenty of ugly hardcore aggression packed into the record, yet it never completely loses its physical identity.

This is music that sounds like it is constantly about to fall apart.

The impressive part is that it never actually does.

It stays just controlled enough to keep the riffs meaningful, just chaotic enough to remain unpredictable, and just short enough that you're immediately tempted to run it back.