A hardcore band from Sheffield that started its own label because no label would do it properly has now made a record in Dave Grohl's studio with the producer who does Lamb of God. Whatever your instinct is about that sentence, hold onto it, because it turns out to be the whole review.
Malevolence released Where Only the Truth Is Spoken on 20 June 2025 through their own MLVLTD alongside Nuclear Blast, eleven tracks and forty two minutes, their fourth album and the follow up to Malicious Intent. Alex Taylor sings, Josh Baines and Konan Hall play guitar with Hall taking the melodic vocals, Wilkie Robinson plays bass and Charlie Thorpe drums. Josh Wilbur produced. It went to thirty two on the UK album chart, one on the rock and metal chart, and three on the independent chart, which for a band who were putting out their own records six years ago is a genuinely absurd set of numbers.
The production is the first thing anybody mentions and four separate outlets mention it approvingly, which is unusual agreement. It is enormous. The low end has genuine weight rather than the sandpaper fizz these bands normally settle for, the drums have room around them, and Taylor's snarl sits on top of it all without being smoothed into a radio voice. Blabbermouth reached for Pantera's Far Beyond Driven as a comparison and, for once, that is not lazy.
"If It's All the Same to You" is the one everybody names and deserves it: a slow, swampy, faintly doomed thing with a solo that has no business being that good on a hardcore record. "Counterfeit" is the fastest and meanest, thrash bolted to a hardcore chassis. "Salt the Wound" is the most nakedly Pantera-worshipping thing here and gets away with it. And "In Spite" has Randy Blythe on it, which is where the trouble starts.
When your guest is the most memorable voice on your own album, that is data, not a compliment.
Because here is the disagreement, and it is a proper three way one. The big magazines hear a level up: bigger sound, wider range, same band. Metal Hammer hears no change at all and says so approvingly, that they are doing what they were doing a decade ago and doing it well. And the smaller end, Boolin Tunes most bluntly at five out of ten, hears something else entirely: directional confusion, arena rock gestures, a band reaching for a room bigger than the one their songs were built for, and a guest verse that walks off with a track.
This desk lands closer to the last one, but without the sneering. Nothing here is a sell-out and anybody using that word about a band who still run their own label needs a lie down. The problem is subtler. When the sound gets this big, the parts that made Malevolence funny and mean and specific, the bits that came from playing to eighty people in a room with a low ceiling, have to compete with a mix designed for a festival stage. Sometimes they win. On "Trenches" and "Counterfeit" they absolutely win. On the melodic choruses that arrive on schedule in the back half, they do not.
It is worth remembering how they got here, because it is not the usual story. They set up their own label in 2019 after two albums on other people's, built their own rehearsal room, and put out the record that got them noticed on their own money. Nuclear Blast came later and, on this album, is a partner rather than an owner: the release carries both names. That history is exactly why the arena-sized production is a question rather than a scandal. Nobody made them do this. They chose it, with the paperwork in their own hands.
Kon Hall told Metal Hammer they thought they would get a top ten and got smoked by Abba and Oasis, which is the funniest thing any British metal musician said in 2025 and also, accidentally, the point. This is a band standing at the door of a much larger room and deciding whether to walk in. This record has one foot on either side of it. Very good, occasionally great, and slightly less itself than the one before.