Malevolance

Supports: Sylosis, Justice For The Damned, Guilt Trip

Breaking boundaries, finding new forms of expression, counteracting the pigeonholing of hard music by writing songs that defy all classical categories: Listening to the British quintet Malevolence from Sheffield, one could assume that this is what the band is all about. But on their three albums and two EPs so far, the band formulates this special sound between hardcore punk and thrash metal, metalcore and stoner rock, beatdown and sludge metal in a purely intuitive, powerful way. One quickly recognizes: Nothing here is designed on the drawing board, but simply the expression of five young musicians who express their anger at the world and its condition in an appropriately drastic way. The latest testimony to this is their current, third album "Malicious Intent" , with which Malevolence will be on tour in Hamburg, Cologne, Chemnitz, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Oberhausen from November 13 - accompanied by special guests Sylosis, Justice for the Damned and Guilt Trip.

Malevolence 's brute roots date back to 2010, when guitarists Josh Baines and Konan Hall teamed upwith bassist Wilkie Robinson and drummer Charlie Thorpe. Baines and Hall have been close friends for some time at this point, indulging their shared love of hard music since 2005 and performing on stage with a metal band for the first time at the age of 12. Together with Alex Taylor on vocals, the first demo was created in 2010, which immediately met with much enthusiasm in the quite vital hardcore scene of their home in South Yorkshire. With a steady supply of new metal and hardcore samplers and self-organized Road Rage tours, the seeds for Malevolence are planted. In 2013 they enter the professional music arena for the first time with the release of their debut album "Reign of Suffering", tour Europe with Dying Fetus and then storm across America with Kublai Khan and Jesus Piece.

The press is immediately impressed by the debut: Metal Hammer writes, for example, "Malevolence sound as if Dimebag Darrell had joined Hatebreed to work on a sludge album," while Distorted Sound says, "Malevolence undoubtedly shine, laying down riffs that alternate between pounding metallic hardcore and grimy metal with consummate ease and equal competence." In 2017, the band followed up with their second album, " Self Supremacy," which, while stylistically hitting a similar notch, also integrated new elements such as stoner rock and whipping thrash metal into their widely differentiated sound.

A special case in the British metal scene anyway, the band decides to found their own label with MLVLTD after the second album in order to self-release not only their own music, but also that of friendly bands in the future; in the meantime, the label's artist portfolio also includes bands like Fit for an Autopsy and Thy Art Is Murder. After a string of praise for their first self-released EP, " The Other Side," which features Knocked Loose vocalist Bryan Garris on the track "Keep Your Distance," Malevolence set about writing and recording "Malicious Intent " - in the shadow of COVID and a worldwide lockdown.

But the five-piece turns isolation into focus and delivers an album with the current work that seems like a pure explosion. Commercially, too: for the first time, an album of theirs climbs the charts in many countries, with numerous songs boasting between one and five million Spotify plays. As a result, they have emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the British metal scene. Because their intention to make unique hard music has never been realized so consistently.