Review Summary: I signed up for this
Once upon a time, apes climbed down from the trees and became humans who invented things such as the alphabet and gunpowder and ice cream and cash fucking money, which they used to perpetuate a logistically fiendish cycle of befriending, extorting and killing one another, which was debateably very good until some point in the earlyish 2010s when the central priorities of scene music shifted from 3rd-hand At the Gates worship with terrible inhaled screams and cheese grater breakdowns to stadium-ready bilge with negative levels of friction, Catholic cathedral-grade polish, and enough cookie cutter Bastille baby choruses to sustain the greater part of Jeremy Renner's back catalogue. Here, the whole evolutionary framework collapses and the realists among us yeet ourselves back into the ocean forevermore. Wind Walkers aren't the worst band in this style because they neither created it nor embody its most grating attributes distinctively enough to claim ownership to them: they make a stink with the occasional misplaced breakdown (see the coda of "The Overlook") and backfiring hook (flogging arena-level traction out of
just leave me in a bodybag is quite simply not it), but the meat of these songs is frankly too template to attach anything close to a strong feeling to, and the band are generally successful at navigating the various shifts of gear required to turn verses into choruses into bridges into wishfully brutal histrionics and back again. None of this makes
What If I Break? anything more or less than an NPC whinge trip. The 'word' band here is to be read in the most mechanical sense possible, as each instrument (while perfunctory in its role) is mixed together with all the chemistry of an intercontinental Zoom call and has next to nothing in the way of individual flair to fall back on (momentary hints at prog pyrotechnics in "Drowning Hymns" are about as close as we get). Even the strongest moments here reek of deja vu cadences ("Hangfire") and sick puppy lyricism (
do they like me now? mhmm). I am sure there are people who will enjoy this record.
