New Music Review: MOTIONLESS IN WHITE 'Scoring The End Of The World'

MOTIONLESS IN WHITE 'Scoring The End Of The World' - Cover Photo

Rating: 9 / 10 Stars

MOTIONLESS IN WHITE is: Chris “Motionless” Cerulli (Vocals), Ryan Sitkowski (Guitars), Ricky “Horror” Olson (Guitars and Vocals), Justin Morrow (Bass and Vocals), and Vinny Mauro (Drums)

REVIEW – The end of the world has always needed a soundtrack, but MOTIONLESS IN WHITE understand that apocalypse is not only fire falling from the sky. Sometimes it is quieter. Sometimes it is a phone screen glowing in the dark. Sometimes it is a society eating itself alive in real time. Sometimes it is the private collapse happening inside a person who still has to wake up, answer messages, perform stability, and pretend the damage has not started speaking in another voice. With Scoring The End Of The World, set to arrive June 10th via Roadrunner Records, the Scranton, Pennsylvania band seem ready to deliver their most ambitious fusion of metalcore, industrial bite, gothic melodrama, digital panic, and deeply personal self-interrogation. Roadrunner and Atom Splitter PR announced the album for June 10 through Roadrunner Records, with the tracklist previewed by “Cyberhex.”

The title is perfect because it sounds cinematic, but the album’s anxiety is anything but distant. Chris Motionless has described the record as being shaped by the time between “real life and pandemic life,” split between the outside world collapsing and his own internal world becoming darker. That duality gives Scoring The End Of The World its spine. This is not simply a pandemic record, not simply a political record, not simply a therapy record. It is a record about existing between realities and discovering that both are unstable.

“Meltdown” opens like the camera-shake moment in a disaster movie, the second before the city gives way and everyone suddenly realizes the party was built over a fault line. There is a dark humor in the idea of being invited to an end-of-the-world celebration, but Motionless In White are not playing this as parody. The track sounds like panic with confetti in its hair, a frantic collision of heavy guitars, electronic pressure, and theatrical collapse. It sets the tone immediately: the apocalypse may be ridiculous, but it is still coming.

“Sign Of Life” turns inward, away from the burning horizon and into the body that no longer knows how to feel alive. This is one of the album’s most important emotional tracks because it makes the search for survival sound active rather than decorative. The song is not about being saved. It is about looking for even the smallest flicker of will inside darkness and trying to keep the negative self from claiming the entire room. Motionless In White have always balanced horror imagery with emotional clarity, and here that balance feels especially sharp.

Then comes “Werewolf,” the song that feels destined to become one of the band’s defining moments. Built from a strange and irresistible blend of Michael Jackson-like pop movement, Muse-sized theatricality, gothic atmosphere, and Motionless In White’s own industrial-metal bite, it is the kind of track that could have collapsed under its own concept if the band were not so committed. Instead, it swings, stalks, transforms, and glows under a full moon. The werewolf becomes more than a horror icon. It becomes a metaphor for the rage-self, the ugly internal creature that takes over before the human part can stop it.

“Porcelain” answers that monster with fragility. As the companion piece to “Werewolf,” it explores the other half of the same internal conversation: the compassionate self staring across the room at the destructive self and trying to understand what it has done. The title suggests beauty, delicacy, and breakability, but also coldness and distance. Motionless In White have grown increasingly effective at making vulnerability feel theatrical without making it feel fake. “Porcelain” is not soft because it lacks force. It is soft because it knows exactly how easily something precious can shatter.

“Slaughterhouse,” featuring Bryan Garris of Knocked Loose, is the album’s most furious political detonation. Chris Motionless frames the track around capitalism, exploitation, and the feeling of human life being processed for profit, and Garris is the perfect guest for that worldview. His voice does not merely add heaviness; it adds moral emergency. The track is blunt, ugly, and necessary, the sound of people realizing they are not just trapped in the machine but being sold by it. Apple Music’s album listing identifies “Slaughterhouse” as one of the album tracks featuring Bryan Garris.

“Masterpiece” is the other side of that violence: a plea for forgiveness that feels almost uncomfortably exposed. Motionless In White are often at their most commercially effective when they let melody carry self-loathing, and “Masterpiece” understands that perfectly. The song is not asking for easy absolution. It is asking whether the damage can be looked at honestly and still be survived. As a ballad, it has the size expected from the band, but its real weight comes from the plainness of the wound. This is apology as architecture.

“Cause Of Death” returns to the internal battlefield, pairing conceptually with “Sign Of Life.” The track stages two sides of the self trying to bury one another, and that framework is central to the album’s personal material. Motionless In White are not writing about mental struggle as a vague mood. They are giving it characters, voices, weapons, and consequences. “Cause Of Death” suggests that sometimes the danger is not what the world does to you, but which version of yourself survives the fight.

“We Become The Night” expands back outward, standing with those who refuse to let the worst forces define the future. It is an anthem of resistance, but it avoids shallow uplift by keeping the darkness intact. The night here is not defeat. It is territory claimed by people who understand what they are up against. Motionless In White have always thrived in shadow, and this song turns that shadow into solidarity.

“Burned At Both Ends II” is a sequel with genuine purpose. Returning to a theme from a decade earlier, Chris Motionless uses it to measure how much has changed and how much has not. That kind of self-reckoning is crucial on an album so obsessed with personal cycles. Ten years can pass, albums can succeed, crowds can grow, and yet the same internal fires may still be burning from both sides. The sequel framing gives the song emotional continuity without making it feel like a nostalgic callback.

“B.F.B.T.G.: Corpse Nation” turns the band’s “Broadcasting From Beyond the Grave” idea into a recurring series, and this episode takes aim at misinformation, conspiracy, and the QAnon-poisoned sickness of modern reality. Justin Morrow’s heavy involvement in the writing gives the track a different kind of venom, and the result feels like a broadcast from a culture that has already died but keeps transmitting. Motionless In White are at their best when they make digital horror feel physical. “Corpse Nation” does exactly that.

“Cyberhex” is the album’s fan-facing spell, written from a place of gratitude after Chris Motionless reached out during a low point and received overwhelming support. That context gives the song its emotional charge. It imagines a cyberwar between good and evil, but beneath the neon framing is something very human: the need to know that somebody is still there. As the album’s first single, “Cyberhex” was used to announce the record and its June 10 release through Roadrunner.

“Red, White & Boom,” featuring Caleb Shomo of Beartooth, brings punk energy, social frustration, and chaos into one of the album’s strangest pieces. It feels intentionally unstable, a song assembled from parts that should not quite fit until the collision itself becomes the point. Shomo’s presence seals the track’s reckless spirit, giving it the feeling of a firework lit indoors. It is loud, messy, sharp, and completely uninterested in politeness.

The closing title track “Scoring The End Of The World,” featuring Mick Gordon, gives the album the cinematic finale its title promises. Gordon’s work in video game composition, particularly in heavy, industrial, apocalyptic soundscapes, makes him an inspired collaborator, and the song feels like Motionless In White stepping into full end-credits scale. Lyrically, it aligns with “Cyberhex” in celebrating those trying to build something better from the ashes, but it comes from a broader observational view. The final result feels like the band standing at the edge of collapse, not cheering for destruction, but composing the anthem for whatever rises afterward. Roadrunner shared the title track ahead of the album’s arrival and highlighted Gordon’s feature.

What makes Scoring The End Of The World compelling is how fully it embraces Motionless In White’s dual nature. This band can be gothic and sarcastic, sincere and theatrical, political and personal, grotesque and radio-ready, sometimes within the same track. That could make the album feel overstuffed, but its central split between external apocalypse and internal collapse gives the record coherence. The world is ending outside. The self is ending inside. The score needs both strings and screams.

Chris Motionless remains the band’s ringleader, but this album’s force comes from the whole machine. Ryan Sitkowski and Ricky Olson give the guitars their serrated industrial-metal shape, Justin Morrow anchors the low end while contributing to the band’s modern vocal and writing dynamic, and Vinny Mauro brings the kind of drumming that can move between arena force and mechanical precision. This is also the band’s first album to feature Mauro and Morrow performing on a full-length release, reinforcing the sense that Scoring The End Of The World is a new-era statement rather than a simple continuation.

With Scoring The End Of The World, Motionless In White appear poised to deliver one of their most complete records: emotionally direct, socially furious, theatrically oversized, and built for both the pit and the widescreen disaster montage. It is a record about looking at the world, looking inward, and realizing both places are on fire. The difference is that here, the fire has rhythm, hooks, fangs, and a score loud enough to make the end feel survivable.