Protestant

Converge, Botch, Cave In, et al learned how to calculate infinity somewhere. That somewhere was here, Rorschach’s second album. After barking up a storm with Pavlov’s dogs on debut Remain Sedate, these five New Jersey dissonance dissidents looked at the inkblot and saw the future of hardcore. They doubled down on the technicality and the screaming, creating a metalcore masterpiece that combined the best parts of thrash metal’s obtuse angles and hardcore’s punishing directness. Songs like “In Ruins” and “Drawn and Quartered” take Slayer’s demonic riffs, speed them up, slow them down, contort them until they’re unrecognizable. Unfettered by genre orthodoxy, they drew from the darkest corners of extreme music to create an unparalleled entry in the atrocity exhibition. Test: passed.