A warning to the Warped set: The band once known as Code Orange Kids are children no longer. The Pittsburgh savants—musical partners since high school, barely legal at the time of their 2012 signing, long barred from the club circuit due to their age—have certainly paid their dues. They’ve spent the past decade plotting and pummeling their way from the hardcore underground to rock’s MainStage, touring with everyone from Full of Hell and Touché Amoré to Deftones and the Misfits and recording under the guidance of two of the most respected luminaries in their genre. Their first two albums (2012’s Love Is Love // Return to Dust and 2014’s I Am King) were released on Converge frontman Jacob Bannon’s Deathwish Inc. label, and produced by his bandmate Kurt Ballou, one of metal’s most highly-regarded board wizards. And yet, even as they stay the course, the group continue to grapple with their precocious past, leading some to reframe them as interlopers, snooty art school kids trying to act tough.
Certainly, Code Orange’s aesthetic and presence involve plenty of mean mugging: grisly music videos and artwork, on-the-record refusals to tour with acts they consider “bargain-bin deathcore bands,” unflinching accounts of in-studio fist fights, vows of Darwinist vengeance against the “fake rockstar mentality” espoused by scene hotshots like Asking Alexandra (“They will be the first to go,” the self-proclaimed “thinners of the herd” stated ominously in a Facebook post). With their third LP and major-label debut Forever, Code Orange have offered up compelling, caustic–occasionally, even catchy–evidence that their claims of intra-scene superiority are, for the most part, justified.
Despite all this talk, the Code Orange crew's approach is surprisingly communal. There’s no bandleader to speak of; instead, we’ve got a vocal tag-team between drummer Jami Morgan and guitarists Reba Meyers and Eric Balderose, the latter of whom’s on power electronics duty as well. They’re less a trio than a cacophonous hydra fighting with itself, each head bearing a distinctive battle cry: Morgan’s razor-throated yelps and deadpanned raps; Meyers’ piercing shrieks, alternated with the haunting alto typically reserved for her pop-punk side project, Adventures; and Balderose’s guttural death growls. This multivalence is partially to blame for the album’s erratic atmosphere; rather than reconcile these disparate approaches, the band duke things out in turn, leaving the guitar hooks (and Joe Goldman’s unfussed, even-keel bass playing) to tie everything together. Sometimes, a twisted choir forms: the half-sung, half-shouted chorus of “The Mud” for instance, or the end of “Hurt Goes On.”