I know we brutally ignored them in 2025. The Machinist‘s sophomore album Contempt for Life kinda flickered about our peripheral vision last year. But it finally got nowhere near our review pipe. And we regret that. But, as always, hindsight is always 20/20.
But fear naught. Towers, the latest blurb from Manchester-based The Machinist, will nonetheless try to make its point. Sincerely so and with all due wiolence the RMR crew can stomach. And what’s up with this Northern English city? Methinks, it regurgitates brutality with abandon. Case in point, the RMR crew just enjoyed some bastardly encounters from the same neck of the woods. But I digress.
Towers greets you right away with a firestorm of a riff fest that seems to emerge straight from the gates of hell. The style forcefully redefines the term ‘industrial’, fully in line with the name the band chose for themselves. All that frenzied, ondulating mush somewhere between Black and Death Metal really finds its home in some hellish version of tech death. A concoction that likes to build momentum slowly, carried by ferociously effective axe work and a glut of screams, snarls, rasps, and some artfully placed pieces of group chanting. Choirboys of the underworld in unholy unity, meting out punishment in the form of a rough-hewn and deliciously cranky kind of a chant, this crew hardly came across in their long career of mangling promising records.
Towers will bore down on you like those terrible legendary monoliths, born by metal destruction hotter than lava. A concoction that, with its many facets, sails close to the blind rage bands such as Anaal Nathrakh usually preside over. A grimy place where other bands miserably fail. Yet The Machinist managed to coalesce all those swirling chaotic elements into a coherent amalgamation of an alloy that not many on Planet Metal have heard yet.
And that is quite a feat.
Label: Self-Released | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 7 April 2026