PRESIDENT - Blood of Your Empire
The band PRESIDENT is quite literally an enigma. They are four faceless members, not unlike other masked metal collectives from decades past, blending genres and building a career off of unique songwriting and theatrical stage shows. The anonymous UK metal collective has drawn comparisons to the likes of Sleep Token, another anonymous UK metal collective that has grown in popularity over the last few years. But it’s too easy to simply compare them to Sleep Token; the only similarities are their rise in fame, the masks, and the anonymity. Their music is in the same wheelhouse - genre-bending metal - but each group takes liberties with the word “metal” as we know it. PRESIDENT’s debut album, Blood of Your Empire, is an intriguing debut, blending slick R&B production, epic metalcore, and atmospheric electronica with lyrics about religious upbringing and the trauma that followed its impact on their lead vocalist.
The first half of the album is better than the second: album opener “Angel Wings” feels like the perfect medium between radio-friendly modern pop and soaring metalcore that culminates in an epic chorus. The social-media-influenced “DOOM LOOP” features PRESIDENT singing over an industrial-driven beat before delving into an upbeat rock chorus; you can practically hear his vocal cords shred as he pushes his voice beyond its breaking point. The metal/hip-hop hybrid “dark heaven” starts in a rather strange manner before finding him lamenting about how deeply ingrained religion was in his upbringing, condemning the system that raised him (“You just bless the gun and teach the young to pull the trigger/Weigh their grief in carats/Worship flags, not merits/Turn the dead to numbers, keep on spilling guts for tariffs”). “Pink Noise” and “Mercy” are equally as effective in their construction and delivery, both musically and lyrically.
By the time we finish the album’s halfway point, “Sleepwalker”, the album does seem to lose a bit of steam. It features the powerful previously released track “Dionysus”, but the nu-metal stylings of “Hate Figure” don’t seem to work here that well, despite the album doing what I believe to be a tremendous job of melding genres together throughout. “This Will Divide Us” feels like an outlier on the record, trading the heavy impact of previous songs for a piano-driven R&B number. The album’s closer, “White Devil”, feels like a sister track to “Mercy”, a song built around a piano riff that coalesces into a screeching metal number.
Special attention should be given to the record’s ability to genre-blend: the electronic, pop, and metal elements are balanced exceptionally well. Even though not every song is quite up to par - some moments feel experimental in nature and don’t feel fully fleshed out - the group’s ability to weave in and out of genres is extraordinary. Even with a second half that doesn’t quite live up to it’s first, Blood of Your Empire boldly announces to the world who PRESIDENT is and what they are trying to be, without revealing a single identity of those in its trenches.
