Rating: 8 / 10 Stars
ARCHITECTS is: Sam Carter (Vocals), Adam Christianson (Guitars), Josh Middleton (Guitars), Alex Dean (Bass), and Dan Searle (Drums)
REVIEW – ARCHITECTS have reached the point in their career where every move carries the weight of expectation and accusation. There are fans who want the Brighton heavyweights to remain permanently locked inside the tectonic metalcore architecture of their most revered work, and there are others who understand that a band built on grief, urgency, and evolution cannot keep rebuilding the same room forever. With the classic symptoms of a broken spirit, set to arrive October 21, 2022 through Epitaph Records, Architects are preparing to follow For Those That Wish to Exist with an album that seems less interested in grandeur and more interested in impact: industrial pulse, abrasive alt-rock force, synth-led tension, and a worldview so exhausted by modern existence that even rage starts to feel like a survival mechanism.
Where For Those That Wish to Exist stretched outward with orchestral scope, ecological anxiety, arena ambition, and philosophical weight, the classic symptoms of a broken spirit appears to drag that same anxiety into a more immediate, claustrophobic space. Epitaph’s listing confirms the album’s 11-track sequence, from “deep fake” through “be very afraid,” and the compactness alone suggests a sharper, less sprawling statement. This is not Architects trying to make the same enormous gesture twice. This is Architects stripping away strings, leaning into electronics, noise, rhythm, and sharp edges, and asking what it sounds like when the desire to stay awake to the world becomes spiritually exhausting.
Sam Carter’s framing of the record is bleak, and deliberately so. The world surrounding this album is not merely troubled; it is oversaturated with bad news, political rot, climate dread, social fracture, and endless digital exposure. The album’s title is almost clinical in its phrasing, as if Architects are diagnosing a condition rather than dramatizing one. A broken spirit does not always announce itself through collapse. Sometimes its symptoms are doomscrolling, numbness, anger, fatigue, cynicism, helplessness, and the strange guilt of being too aware to look away but too tired to know what to do next.
The opening “deep fake” feels positioned as the album’s industrial mission statement. Carter describes it as leading on from “Animals,” the defining crossover moment from the previous record, and that connection makes sense. “Animals” proved Architects could make something stripped, mechanical, huge, and direct without losing their identity. “deep fake” seems ready to push that machinery into colder territory. The title alone suggests artificiality, manipulated identity, corrupted truth, and a world where reality itself can be engineered. For a band once known for intricate metalcore precision, opening with something synth-led and industrial is not retreat. It is escalation by other means.
“tear gas” appears to capture the record’s core frustration in its most confrontational form. Carter has described the song as a soundtrack for collective anger, a recognition that people are not alone in their disgust at a world where power seems increasingly shameless. The title is perfect because tear gas is both a weapon and an atmosphere. It does not simply strike. It fills the air, invades the body, makes breathing difficult, makes seeing difficult, turns public unrest into physical suffering. That metaphor suits Architects’ current era: political disillusionment not as abstract debate, but as something inhaled.
“spit the bone” broadens that disgust into ecological and moral indictment. The song’s theme, as Carter frames it, is humanity’s addiction to convenience and the way Western excess cannibalizes the vulnerable while exporting catastrophe elsewhere. Architects have long been furious about environmental collapse, but this album seems to treat that fury less as prophetic warning and more as present-tense nausea. “spit the bone” is a title of consumption after the meat is gone, appetite continuing past need, civilization chewing until there is nothing left but evidence.
“burn down my house” brings the record’s external rage back into the body. Carter has spoken often about mental health, particularly in the years since Tom Searle’s passing, and this song seems designed to humanize the point at which someone is not simply angry at the world but endangered by their own inner weather. Architects have always been powerful when they allow vulnerability to sit beside force, and “burn down my house” suggests self-destruction as both image and emergency. The house is shelter, identity, memory, stability. To burn it down is either an act of ruin or a desperate attempt to escape what has become unlivable.
After that, “living is killing us” sounds ready to explode outward like a rave held in a panic room. Carter’s description of the verses feeling like stepping into another room within a club gives the song an immediate spatial quality. Architects are not just writing riffs here; they are designing pressure environments. The title captures one of the album’s central contradictions: existence itself as both gift and punishment, life under modern conditions as something that slowly erodes the person trying to survive it. It is bleak, but the production language promises movement, volume, and kinetic release.
“when we were young” seems positioned as one of the more direct and full-force songs on the record, a late-emerging track built with urgency in the studio. The title could imply nostalgia, but Architects are rarely sentimental in a simple way. Looking back at youth often means measuring the distance between who you were, who you hoped to be, and who the world has forced you to become. In the context of this album, youth may not be innocence so much as a lost form of energy, a time before the symptoms fully set in. The song’s layered synths and sub-bass suggest the band are still willing to thicken even their most straightforward attacks with modern texture.
“doomscrolling” may be the most painfully contemporary title on the album. It needs almost no explanation because everyone already knows the ritual: waking up to horror, falling asleep to horror, feeding the algorithm with your own dread until your attention becomes a trap. Architects have always written about collapse, but “doomscrolling” brings collapse into the palm of the hand. It is not the distant end of the world. It is the refresh button. It is the headline. It is the infinite feed turning empathy into exhaustion and awareness into paralysis.
“born again pessimist” carries a bitter humor that suits the record’s emotional state. The phrase suggests not someone who has always been cynical, but someone who has returned to cynicism after trying not to be. That is more devastating. It means hope was attempted. It means optimism was considered and rejected by evidence. Carter’s mention of an Oasis-like energy in the chorus makes the song especially intriguing, because Architects drawing from big British rock melodicism while maintaining their own industrial heaviness could create one of the album’s most unexpected contrasts. Despair with a singalong is still despair, perhaps even more dangerous because it spreads.
“a new moral low ground” may be the record’s most complete expression of where Architects stand now. Carter calls it his favorite, and it is easy to understand why from the description alone. It appears to gather the band’s current identity into one place: clubby textures, heavy rock force, a chorus with unexpected brightness, a stoner-like middle section, a near-Pink Floyd drift, and even the first guitar solo Architects have ever placed on a record. That last detail matters. For a band so historically associated with precision, rhythm, and structural intensity, a guitar solo represents a different kind of freedom. Not indulgence, but permission. The title, meanwhile, is devastatingly sharp. The world has not hit rock bottom; it has found a lower floor.
“all the love in the world” brings Choir Noir back into the Architects universe, adding drama and size to what Carter describes as a big-sounding rock song. The track’s construction from unconventional percussive sounds—dishwasher slams, fire extinguisher hits, foot stomps—also speaks to the record’s industrial spirit. Architects are turning the everyday environment into percussion, making domestic and physical objects part of the machine. The title itself carries a painful irony. All the love in the world sounds like abundance, but on this album, abundance is never simple. Love can exist and still not be enough to stop collapse.
The closer “be very afraid” promises to end the record with a reminder that Architects have not abandoned their most ferocious instincts. Carter has described it as relentless, a “fuck you” that proves the band can still access the low, growling heaviness central to their identity. But the birdsong recorded by Dan Searle in Devonshire gives the ending a strange and beautiful wrinkle. Architects closing a brutal track with natural ambience feels like a final contrast between violence and fragility, apocalypse and ordinary life, human noise and the world continuing despite us. It is the kind of detail that prevents the song from becoming mere aggression.
What makes the classic symptoms of a broken spirit such an important follow-up is that Architects seem to be refusing the defensive posture expected of them. They are not apologizing for change. They are not pretending this album is simply a return to older forms. They are also not abandoning heaviness. Instead, they are redefining what heaviness means for a band this deep into its career. Sometimes heaviness is a breakdown. Sometimes it is a synth pulse. Sometimes it is the realization that your phone has trained you to metabolize catastrophe before breakfast. Sometimes it is a chorus big enough to carry an entire crowd’s exhaustion.
Sam Carter remains the emotional and physical voice of the band’s unrest. His delivery has grown broader, more melodic, and more openly rock-facing, but that does not make it less intense. If anything, the directness makes the anger easier to inhabit. Dan Searle and Josh Middleton’s production role also feels crucial here, with the album produced by the pair and positioned as the band’s tenth studio record through Epitaph. Adam Christianson, Alex Dean, and the rest of the band help shape a version of Architects that feels less ornate than the last album but more immediate, less philosophical in presentation but just as existential underneath.
There will be arguments about this record. That feels inevitable. Architects occupy a difficult place because they are both beloved and policed by their own history. But a band that has spent sixteen years evolving from progressive metalcore toward something broader, sharper, and more electronically charged should not be expected to freeze at the moment a portion of the audience felt most comfortable. Comfort is not the point of Architects. It never was.
the classic symptoms of a broken spirit is poised to be a record about depletion in an age that demands constant attention. It is about the emotional cost of being aware, the moral nausea of watching power operate without shame, the ecological horror of convenience, the private devastation of mental illness, and the absurdity of trying to remain intact while the world keeps refreshing itself into worse versions of the same nightmare.
With this album, Architects do not seem interested in asking whether the world is broken. That answer is already in the title. Instead, they appear to be cataloging the symptoms: anger, fatigue, numbness, cynicism, dread, disconnection, and the desperate need to turn all of it into sound before it eats away the last working parts of the soul. It may not be the Architects album every listener expects, but it may be exactly the Architects album this moment deserves.
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