Nov. 4, 2025
Album Review - Despised Icon "Shadow Work"
The cover of Despised Icon’s new record Shadow Work features a protagonist wearing his lower jaw as a crown, which is the best possible illustration of what listening to Shadow Work feels like. The meaning of the painting itself is ambiguous. Is this character surrendering to outside forces turning him into a monster or is he accepting the damage done while embracing suffering and adversity in one final taunt?
In this question, you have the essence of how it feels to listen to Despised Icon: it’s music that makes you want to punch the jaw off a deserving face, but that also makes you want to run 10 KM, start a small business and maybe go back to school. Shadow Work is the sound of a band who understand who they are and why people love them.
Six years after the solid, but ultimately unmemorable Purgatory, we all thought we knew what to expect from the Montreal six piece. Their identity is clear. Their sound is unique and timeless in a subgenre that loves trends a little too much sometimes. But there was another level of raw aggression and intensity left to explore. An even darker frequency buried beneath the rubble of their own history and somehow they found it.
This new album features eleven songs and thirty-six minutes of crushing and surprisingly diverse deathcore powered by the twin-headed vocal hydra of Alex Erian and Steve Marois. The one thing about Shadow Work that jumps at you like a rabid baboon within the first two seconds is that it’s one pissed off record. Don’t get me wrong, Despised Icon are an angry band by any stretch of the imagination, but this is on another level.
On the title song, the two singers come barreling out of the gate with their brand of constructive, empowering aggression, to machine gun precise drumming and black metal-inspired melodic guitar riffs.There’s technicality, but no pretense of complexity here, which is its own kind of sophistication. The band’s refusal to overthink their songwriting is what gives the opener its force. It’s not just heavy, it’s decisive. How can Shadow Work follow such a powerful statement? Well, with the first single Over My Dead Body, which is possibly my favorite song I’ve heard all year. As a known enjoyer of excessive things, I loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of mean vocals provided by Kublai Khan TX’s Matt Honeycutt’s featuring set to two other variables I love in metal: grooves and dissonance. It feels like a song that was written just for me.
Also, I don’t know which one of the three guys growls like a dog at the end, but it’s a nice detail. It’s two seconds, but it captures the bulldog energy of the song so well.
Death of An Artist, the second single, leans more on the death metal side of Despised Icon. Love the atmospheric guitar bridge and outro, which give quite the contrast with the intensity and sheer muscularity of the song. It highlights an important variable of Despised Icon’s music that doesn’t always translate through vocals hurled with such feral energy: their aggression comes from a raw and introspective place. It’s a band that has turned anger into a tool for self-reinvention.
Corpse Pose is another deathcore bombshell that explodes into your ear canal. It has one of the most infectious choruses on the record with the gang-chanted “RUDE AWAKE-NING”. One of the most blood pumping breakdowns too. Breakdowns as a dime a dozen in deathcore, but the one at the end of Corpse Pose is blood curling and memorable. I believe Steve Marois’ heartfelt, soul-ripping gutturals are the reason why it works so well. I didn’t know that gutturals could be heartfelt, but Marois’ emotional intensity is coming across the most inhumane sounds on Shadow Work. So much darkness in such a small dude.
Next is the third single The Apparition. Once again, quite the atmospheric intro layered with just enough hints of black metal to remain flavorful. The song means obviously a lot to the band as they invited friends for gang vocals at the end, but I felt it was perhaps the weakest song on Shadow Work. It’s not bad and it has a well-defined identity with that breakdown and gang chants at the end, but it’s packaged between such ferocious bangers that it feels like a shy little and emotive little brother a little bit.
Speaking of ferocious, Reaper is another one of these songs that felt like the band had written just for me. There’s not three, but four singers on here: Erian, Marois, Chelsea Grin’s Tom Barber and Carnifex’s Scott Ian Lewis. It’s a groovy, anthemic (and yes, adorably excessive) mid-tempo scorcher where Alex Erian acts as the master of ceremony to a murderer’s row of deathcore legend. His presence gives such a well-defined edge to Despised Icon over other deathcore bands. As everyone else competes on who can gurgle the lowest, his hardcore vocals and sensibility give the music clarity of purpose. His complete command of his craft shines the brightest on Reaper.
That was only the first song of a series of unskippable face melters that continues with In Memoriam, featuring Australian keyboardist Misstiq who nailed the assignment of providing atmosphere and depth. There’s a rare peak of Alex Erian’s clean singing, which anchors the song in an emotional clarity that surfaces from the overwhelming brutality of Shadow Work. Courageous decision, but a correct one. There should be vulnerability in grief and it’s what transpires from In Memoriam. When I said this album was purposeful and diverse, I wasn’t kidding. Omen of Misfortune completes this triumvirate of badass songs with another energetic, straight shooting and obsessive three minutes punctuated by some of Steve Marois’ best “Heee beee bee bees” and the manta “OMINOUS ENERGY” repeated over and over.
Obsessive Compulsive Disaster is another one of these more death metal leaning songs. Some of the guitar riffs at the beginning reminded me of mid-era Cannibal Corpse. It’s another one of these songs where Despised Icon’s gift for simple, but efficient song structures. These guys are the kings of guitar bridges. They use them to change the dynamics and renew the energy of a song in 5 seconds or less. It’s brilliant and it manages to make three minute songs feel like they’re some kind of journey. ContreCoeur is the mandatory song in French. It’s fun and over before it starts. It’s more of a jacked up hardcore song, but it feels good to hear the guys represent where they’re from.
Shadow Work ends with Fallen Ones, which is the longest song on the record at almost four minutes. I loved the slow grooves and the clever use of double bass drum in a mid-tempo song, but it feels like another weaker cut on what is otherwise a crusher of a record. I’m not certain why they wanted to put another grief song after a powerful statement like In Memoriam, but this one felt a little barren and unnecessary as I was still recoiling from the former.
I don’t know how they’ve done it in their mid-forties, but Despised Icon have released their best record since The Ills of Modern Man and… perhaps their best record to date? Maybe it’s because I’m in my mid-forties too and that my younger self wouldn’t react so viscerally to Shadow Work, but I thought it is as purposeful as it is monumental. Despised Icon are the living proof that you don’t necessarily have to move away from your anger as you grow older, but that you can embrace and use it as a tool to constantly create and reinvent yourself. If that isn’t inspiring to middle-aged dudes like me, well I don’t know what is.
Review Crew
A killer group of Metalheads that live for music, craft beer & writing reviews about albums that they love.
Album Review - Cryptopsy "An Insatiable Violence"
No rest for the wicked that are the members of the Montreal based extreme metal outfit Cryptopsy. Just twenty-one months after dropping the Juno Award winning As Gomorrah Burns, Cryptopsy re-emerges from the darkness to unleash their ninth full-leng…
Album Review - Lipoma "No Cure for the Sick"
You don’t choose to listen to goregrind as much as it chooses you as a listener. It’s a subgenre of metal so cutthroat and uncompromising that it’s primarily enjoyed by people who are cutthroat and uncompromising about art. Melodic…