Most heavy artists spend years toiling in the underground, releasing respectable works, before the planets align and elevate their latest record above the plebeian muck. Seattle trio Great Falls formed in 2010 from members of mathy weirdos Playing Enemy, but it wasn’t until their fourth full-length, Objects Without Pain (2023), that the group found a real audience. That album blended metalcore, noise rock, sludge metal, and a screamo ethos into a singular sound, and its harrowing portrait of divorce and personal collapse made it one of the year’s strongest releases.1 So I’m going into their newest record, The Bite That Grows Up, with high expectations, as it seems to continue the band’s commitment to rendering complex, unflinching emotional honesty in aural form. The question is whether lightning can strike twice, or whether Great Falls has already given us the best of its wreckage.
On paper, Great Falls’ sound might seem like a grab bag of adjacent genre tags, but on The Bite That Grows Up, the trio’s immaculate chemistry lets these disparate elements gel perfectly as they unleash their unique brand of sonic devastation. Great Falls wields the narrative-focused, unnerving, sludged-out noise rock of Couch Slut, Coalesce-style mathcore bursts and explosions of cinematic, Neurosis-inspired post-metal riffs, all built around screamo’s sense of raw vulnerability. Guitarist/vocalist Demian Johnston and bassist Shane Mehling have been playing off-putting, heavy music together for over 25 years, and that relationship shows in the deftness with which they navigate these varied compositions. Johnston’s guitar oscillates between subdued, suspended arpeggios and full-on Thou heft, while Mehling pushes the undulating passages forward with a stankface-inducing bass tone that would make David Wm. Sims blush. Drummer Nick Parks (Bastard Feast, Gaytheist) proves just as versatile, laying down uneasy, off-kilter grooves in the quieter sections and acrobatic, octopus-armed flourishes as the intensity ramps up, locking in expertly while steering these expansive tunes. The band moves as one unit, milking each moment of slow-burn menace and frightening riff bombardment for maximum catharsis.
The Bite That Grows Up sees Great Falls fully embraces a masterful dynamism, with most tracks lingering in sparse peril to heighten their eventual cacophony. Opener “A Small Weakness” lays out this dichotomy clearly, switching between skull-crushing, angular sludge and Unwound-esque clean pullbacks, all led by Johnston’s throat-shredding wails of poignant confession. The same formula drives the longer tracks, which pit long feedback swells (“Hailstone Numbers”), jazzy odd-meter verses (“Debt Ethics”) and rolling no wave loops (“Worse Than Sleep”) against stuttering metalcore detonations. Even on the shorter, early Converge-like rippers (“Pinned Against Time,” “Buildings Full of Rope”), Great Falls shows a keen sense of pacing and artistry within the chaos, so that every spastic guitar run and drum fill still serves the record’s natural flow. This intentionality keeps the album from growing stale. Each careful build magnifies the tension until it finally bursts, and there are enough layers buried in the wreckage to keep you coming back to peel them apart.
Behind the musical chaos, Great Falls builds a rich thematic backbone through Johnston’s words and pained vocal delivery. The lyrics on The Bite That Grows Up were conceived as an intense, imagined group therapy session, and their personal confessions and tormented declarations perfectly mirror the record’s dark sonic landscape. Alongside more general outpourings of anguish, like “I’m sorry, I think I’m done, I’m not sure about this” (“A Small Weakness”), many of the lyrics center on the parental anxiety born from Johnston’s daughter running away from home. This surfaces in gut-wrenching lines like “Are we to blame? Is it nice where you are?” (“Worse Than Sleep”), but it comes to a head on closer “What No One Can Give.” Between chilling piano-led passages and pummeling noise rock, Johnston gives voice to his daughter’s perspective, “Father, please calm down, take your pills,” closing the album on a haunting, somber note.
The Bite That Grows Up is the kind of record that reminds you what heavy music is capable of. Great Falls have crafted an intensely emotional journey through inner turmoil, one whose singular sound magnifies every ounce of its pain. They’ve taken screamo’s soul-searing, bare-chested honesty and weaponized it, armoring every confession with enough bludgeoning riffs and skronky nuance to silence any gatekeeper who still mistakes vulnerability for weakness. Lightning, it turns out, can strike twice, and this time it lands even closer to the bone, making for one of the year’s most viscerally disarming releases.
Rating: Great!
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: Stream
Label: Neurot Recordings
Websites: greatfalls.bandcamp.com | instagram.com/greatfallsnoise
Releases Worldwide: October 16th, 2026
The post Great Falls – The Bite That Grows Up Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.
