Paradise

When the dust clears, even though the album's length clocks in a bit long for them, you can't escape how they utilized the room to breathe. To cause chaos. Without really shouting. Paradise is ambitious and really stakes an early claim for album of the year.

On Paradise, Barber-Way steps outside of her own body and the assaults it sustains, and creates a searing portrait of what it can look like to love without fear, even when that love doesn't resemble the fantasy we've been sold.

While this sort of economic chords and vocal/guitar/bass/drum hardcore punk rock record is easy to come by, what’s rarer is when its aggression--not necessarily just in the vocals and lyrics--comes from someplace genuine.

What sets Paradise apart, though, is an even finer polish than its predecessor Deep Fantasy, the first album to benefit from a Domino-bequeathed luster. So much of that subtle maturation is due to William’s expansive and inventive playing.

Paradise is White Lung pushing their limits and coming out bloodied, hungry for more. It’s a record full of disease, doubt, dumpsters, and death, with the band rising above it all and reveling in their filth.

They've taken things into a place where that barbed-wire charm takes a backseat to sounding absolutely enormous. [4 Jun 2016, p.53]

These songs are raw and muscular. [No. 131, p.61]

Paradise lands closer to technical brilliance than emotional resonance, but you can feel the band reaching.

With Paradise, White Lung have ultimately crafted an album of hooky, infectious songs that still retain all the rage and D.I.Y. punk creativity of their previous work.

They haven’t completely ditched the relentless aggression--much of Paradise races past in an alluring blur of distortion and melody--but this is a welcome broadening of their palette.

White Lung sound both heavier and more accessible on Paradise, once again proving that there's far more to this band than meets the eye.

White Lung push themselves to every corner of the universe on Paradise, presenting a beautiful vision of 22nd Century pun

Overall, Paradise is another thrilling entry into White Lung’s catalogue that proves the band still has plenty of exciting new ground to crush beneath their heel.

It's sleek through and through; vicious when it needs to be, yet overwhelmingly classy. [Jun 2016, p.93]

Overall, though, the new direction works. It keeps the band from repeating itself and manages to remind that sometimes the most furious rock songs aren’t always about anger; they’re about honesty.

This release strikes the perfect balance between pummelling the listener over the head with riffs and rewarding their shredded eardrums with hooks and honesty.

One cannot help but feel as though, if White Lung had let themselves get a little messier on Paradise, it might have yielded an even more compelling result.

On Paradise, cleaner recording--proudly made with Pro Tools--largely sharpens instead of defangs, while bringing out guitarist Kenneth Williams' surprisingly deep cabinet of textures. [Jun 2016, p.82]

Paradise is--like the acute respiratory distress syndrome they're named for--breathtaking and terrifying in equal measure.

There's a calculation to much of what's on offer here that undercuts all the other advancements. [#361, p.116]

There’s an urgency to Paradise, with punishing drums and agitated guitars, but the band never quite embrace the obvious.

Unfortunately their laudable desire to sound like the future rather than the past seems to have backfired, leaving ‘Paradise' a crop of good ideas that wear quickly on the ears. On the plus side this overly polished sound might help convert at least a few godforsaken You Me at Six fans onto real punk (that is, if real punk will have them).

Paradise is a better pop record but less immediately fun than previous offerings.