Two albums ago this band was writing about childhood trauma with clean vocals and acoustic guitars, and doing it well. This one opens with a song called "Prisoner 666" and does not let up for forty three minutes. Both things are Whitechapel. Only one of them is fun.
Whitechapel released Hymns in Dissonance on Metal Blade on 7 March 2025, ten tracks, their ninth album. Phil Bozeman sings, Ben Savage, Zach Householder and Alex Wade play guitar, Gabe Crisp plays bass, Brandon Zackey drums. The big change is behind the desk: Householder produced it himself, the first Whitechapel record since 2010 that Mark Lewis did not produce. Drew Fulk and Jeff Dunne mixed, Ted Jensen mastered. It went to two on Billboard's current hard rock chart and six on the British rock and metal chart.
It is a concept record about a cult, which normally means an hour of narration and one good song. Not here. Bozeman explained the title to The Aquarian and it is the clearest statement of intent the band has given in years.
Hymns in Dissonance is a mockery of the true nature of what hymns are. Hymns are melodious and harmonious. Dissonance is the opposite of melody and harmony. Dissonance represents evil.
Phil Bozeman, The Aquarian, 19 March 2025
The self-production is the story. Householder shadowed Lewis across five albums and then took the chair, and the record sounds like somebody who knows exactly which frequencies this band lives in. The guitars are thicker than they have been in a decade. More importantly the drums sound like drums: one Metal Archives reviewer specifically noted the kicks are not triggered into oblivion, which on a modern deathcore record is close to a miracle.
"A Visceral Retch" and "Hate Cult Ritual" are the two heaviest things the band has put its name to, and that is a sentence with a lot of competition behind it. "Diabolic Slumber" and "The Abysmal Gospel" are where it gets interesting, because both dig into actual melodic death metal rather than deathcore, and both are better written than the songs around them. "Nothing Is Coming for Any of Us" closes the record at six minutes and is the only track that gives you room to breathe, which after nine songs of this feels less like mercy and more like a threat.
This is the band choosing to be frightening again, and it turns out they are very good at it.
It is worth being specific about what got put down, because "they went back to being heavy" undersells it. The Valley in 2019 and Kin in 2021 were built around Bozeman writing directly about his own childhood, with clean singing carrying the parts that mattered most, and they got this band written about by people who had never taken deathcore seriously. That is the thing this album walks away from. There is not a clean vocal on it. Whatever else it is, it is a decision, and the band made it with their eyes open.
The one real argument about this record is whether it is a reset or a retreat. Angry Metal Guy took the second view, gave it three out of five, and said the band sees no need to progress its sound, which is a fair thing to say about a group that just spent two albums doing something braver and then stopped. No Clean Singing, MetalSucks, Distorted Sound and the Metal Archives crowd, who agree on nothing, all took the first view and called it a return.
Both readings are true and the ordering matters. As a record you put on, this is easily the most effective thing they have made since 2008: dense, fast, mean, and short enough that it never becomes wallpaper. As a career move it is a step sideways from the two albums that made them interesting to people who do not like this genre. If they never go back to the clean vocals, something real is lost. If this is a break rather than a reversal, it is a great one.
Play it loud, play it once through, and see if you make it to the end without your neck hurting. That is what it was built for and it does it better than anything else this scene put out in 2025.