There are plenty of heavy albums, but Fleshwork stares directly into the ugliest parts of life in 2025 and screams until the glass breaks. The themes are grounded in grisly political realities with no fantasy as an escape hatch, delivering real-world horror with the force of a society collaping under its own rot.

Benefits cuts and bureaucratic cruelty, digital isolation and algorithmic echo chambers. Fleshwork is an album about the Kafkaesque nightmares we’re all being forced to survive made of the same material as the frayed, furious, and overwhelmed population of Britain. The music communicates the panic and grief of now with uniquely grisly screams that sound like Kate Davies is ripping the sides of her mouth open like the Joker. Visceral and shocking, every vowel feels like she’s tearing a new wound.

For all the technical ferocity contained within, Fleshwork is a mathcore record that puts emotions first, technicality second. The musicianship is jaw-dropping, but its more of a survival mechanism than a way of showing off. The angular time-signature switches on Gordian are dictated by the subject matter rather than being clever for their own sake, and the massive industrial chug of the title track Fleshwork sounds like the furnace of the UK’s metal underground rather than nodding to any American tropes.

Emotionally overwhelming and shaped by real-world suffering, Fleshwork is so exciting because it sounds like Britain right now. With the dungeon-industrial dread of Heriot and the enormous emotional weight of Svalbard, Fleshwork sounds like ArcTanGent when the tent is heaving, with guitars that veer between monstrous grooves and disorientating mathcore spasms, and drums that feel like a fight.

Fleshwork is unmistakably British, emotionally raw, and politically current. The rage isn’t abstract or theatrical. It’s born of a moment in history when everyone is struggling under very real forces that crush our everyday lives. The album lands hard because the fear, grief, and claustrophobic fury are so real and the need for release is so desperate. The one melodic track White Noise sounds like Kate is singing from the back of the room, with the voice engineered for distance as the lyrics speak of not being heard. The production mirrors the political realities contained within. Fleshwork is the sound of being overwhelmed in a world that never gets easier, with nothing left to do but scream.

The album is a tour of everything heavy music in Britain is doing right in 2025. The mathcore unpredictability is balanced with straight, followable 4/4 that lets you sit inside the groove long enough to let the steam rise. One minute you’re inside something that could pass for pure grindcore, the next it’s an extreme prog-metal passage, and then you’re dropped into a weaponised industrial chug. A grab-bag of every dialect of extreme metal, filtered through a frantic, anxious, grief-driven lens of British politics.

The scale of this thing is ludicrous for a trio with drums that switch between blastbeats and a hardcore stomp, snaking bass melodies and tumbling mathcore riffs, but it’s Kate’s unvarnished vocal delivery that feels truly dangerous. It’s throat-shredding horror with the jagged edges exposed, not the tidy roar of American metalcore.

The eight-minute odyssey Cenote is a multi-part suite that spirals through progressive passages and pulverising breakdowns, frantic technical bursts and devastating black metal catharsis. Beneath all the technical mastery, this is an album about grief in the real world, and that’s why it feels like a watershed moment for this whole UK wave of heavy metal. Most mathcore bands would never attempt to make music this complicated that’s also so emotionally visceral and politically pointed.

If you want to understand what extreme metal sounds like in Britain right now, as well as the actual emotional and political tissue of our society, Fleshwork is a ferocious, overwhelming, and necessary document. No other metal record this year has captured the emotional temperature of our fucked country with such terrifying accuracy.