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Slaughter To Prevail‘s Grizzly might be one of the most uninteresting and messiest metal records of 2025. The riffs are forgettable, the songwriting is either horribly messy or painfully predictable, and the songs don’t go anywhere. There’s no real sense of momentum or cohesion throughout this entire record — it just feels like a collection of ideas thrown together into a playlist, and then that playlist was pressed onto vinyl and marketed as an album. Which I guess sorta makes sense considering seven of the 13 songs found on Grizzly were released as singles between 2022 and 2025.

Let’s just talk about the first three tracks on Grizzly so you can get a sense of what I’m talking about here. “Banditos” kicks off Grizzly with a pretty Slipknot-inspired groove — which you better get used to, because that type of groove is all over this record.

But then all of a sudden it smash cuts to a breakdown about one minute in, which I might add is preceded by a standalone chug, so you know that breakdown’s coming, baby, here we go! And then all of a sudden there’s a whole choir behind the band as they go for this huge, epic orchestral thing, and then that smash cuts to this real mid-2000s deathcore riff with loads of short pinch harmonics. And then after that, the intro part comes back, there’s the choir thing again, and then there’s a full 30 seconds of a Spanish-language song sample, and then a completely unrelated breakdown to end the song.

I’m still talking about “Banditos,” by the way — this track is five minutes long and feels like four totally disconnected song ideas awkwardly stapled together. There’s no flow to this song at all — it’s just a series of abrupt gear shifts that feel like it was written explicitly so it could be cut up into 30-second fragments to soundtrack social media videos.

Then there’s “Russian Grizzly In America” — one of the many singles released ahead of the album — and it’s déjà vu all over again. It opens with yet another Slipknot-style groove that’s almost identical in both tempo and vibe to the one that opens up “Banditos,” and just kinda does that for a little while.

“Russian Grizzly In America” is mostly sung in Russian, aside from literally lifting the lyric “enemy, show me what you wanna be” from Slipknot’s “(sic)” — word for word, and also rhythm for rhythm too. I’m starting to think the cover of the album over here isn’t just branding — maybe it’s actually Slaughter To Prevail vocalist Alex Terrible quietly pitching himself to Slipknot, given everything I’ve heard from these first two tracks.

“Russian Grizzly In America” fluctuates between the Slipknot thing and some higher-registered deathcore before eventually ending on a series of breakdowns punctuated by another sample from another random song.

The breakdown also highlights a much bigger issue I’ve had with deathcore as a genre lately, which is the stupid vocal acrobatics. And don’t get me wrong — guys like Alex Terrible have serious range, jumping from subhuman gutturals to screeching highs — but lately it feels like the genre is more focused on vocal showboating than actual songwriting. It’s becoming less about emotion or intensity, and more about who can hit the best pig noise or sound most like they’re vomiting on the mic instead of, you know, writing a song worth listening to.

“Imdead” doesn’t offer anything that we haven’t already heard in the first two tracks — except now there are guest vocals from Ronnie Radke. Radke’s first appearance is in the chorus of the song, where he brings some clean, melodic singing that feels more like a crossover attempt than it does an actual creative decision to make the song good.

Later in the same song, things take a turn for the theatrical with this choral section that sounds like Nightmare Before Christmas meets goth kid in high school theater, and comes complete with a big swung groove underneath so you know you’re moving and grooving here. It’s dramatic, it makes absolutely no sense in this song, and it’s pretty cringey.

But that’s not it — because this is Grizzly, and every song has to have 27 unrelated parts. Because now, after that high school goth kid thing, the track rushes into a frantic blastbeat section, hits a breakdown, and then that’s it. That’s the end of the song. Once again, it feels like a pile of disconnected fragments loosely assembled into a “song” and aimed squarely at listeners with the shortest possible attention spans. Nothing sticks, nothing builds — just more genre tropes shuffled around in a different order this time.

I’ll just give you a quick rundown of some other sticking points on Grizzly here. “Viking” and “Kid Of Darkness” feel like they solely exist as a vehicle for more vocal flexing. “Song 3” bends over backwards — stylistically and structurally — to awkwardly fit in Babymetal as a guest. “Behelit” is just straight up a bad symphonic deathcore reject that would’ve maybe flown in 2008. And “Lift That Shit” feels like the answer to the question: “What if Electric Callboy wrote ‘Pump It’ for dudes who punch drywall and drink Monster?”

I mean, even “Rodina” — which feels like a slower, almost late-career Whitechapel kind of ballad-type song — fails to make any emotional impact. It’s clearly meant to be one of the album’s big emotional moments, but there’s nothing there. It’s just a handful of ideas stretched far too thin, there’s no real differentiation between it and everything that came before it, and the result just feels like more shuffling of a very limited deck of cards.

And again — this feels like it should’ve been the big emotional moment, the big comedown — and it’s just nothing.

One of the biggest offenders on Grizzly is the constant pausing in the songwriting to introduce a new section. And I mean every single song does it — at least once, often more — and it’s such a damper on the overall energy and flow of each song and the album overall. Slaughter To Prevail plays a riff or two, builds some momentum, and then stops the song dead in its tracks so Alex Terrible can growl real big, or some lone guitar can chug something out, or a completely unrelated sample can play for a few seconds. It’s just… play the song.

At this point, you might be wondering why I even chose to review Grizzly, especially when it’s very clear that I did not like this record. And the reason I chose to review it is because Slaughter To Prevail — despite my opinions presented here — is one of the bigger metal bands in all of metal right now. They’re landing high slots on major festivals like Inkcarceration, Louder Than Life, Aftershock, and Knotfest Mexico in 2025 alone. They matter in the current metal landscape.

And when a band reaches the level that Slaughter To Prevail is at, it’s worth taking a serious look at the actual quality of the music they’re putting out. Big bands shape the culture — what gets emulated, what gets booked, what gets pushed forward, what gets cut up and used on social media, and of course, what gets covered in metal media. Without honest criticism, everything starts to blur together into this bland stew where everybody pretends everything is great just to keep the peace and make friends — and I don’t want to do that.

My opinion is pretty simple: Slaughter To Prevail is massive, and I’d like to see them act like it musically. I want to see big bands rise to the occasion, push boundaries, and put out something that matters. Instead, with Grizzly, we get something that feels creatively bankrupt, structurally sloppy, and emotionally hollow — and that is really disappointing.

All that being said, I give Grizzly a solid “please don’t make me listen to this anymore” out of ten. There’s just nothing here for me — and I suspect anyone looking for a deathcore experience with even a shred of depth or cohesion is gonna feel the same. Grizzly is a disjointed mess that confuses brutality for quality and spectacle for substance. Slaughter To Prevail may be one of the biggest names in the genre right now, but Grizzly is proof that popularity doesn’t equal greatness. And honestly, I just want better from bands that are this visible.