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 you notice and it is not close. 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. The obvious comparison is Pantera's Far Beyond Driven, and for once the obvious comparison is the right one: this is the same trick of making a groove sound like a building coming down on a slow count.
"If It's All the Same to You" is the track that walks off with the album and knows 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 this is where the album divides a room, and it divides it three ways. Hear it as a level up: bigger sound, wider range, the same band with the roof taken off. Hear it as no change at all, which is not the insult it looks like, because a band doing in 2025 exactly what it did in 2015 and doing it well is rarer than it sounds. Or hear the third reading, the uncomfortable one: 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.
The third reading is the correct one, and it does not need the sneering that usually comes with it. 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.