There are three camps in the Periphery fanbase. Those that like their vicious Meshuggah-inspired tech metal go up against those that enjoy the quartet’s anthemic metalcore sound, which values virtuoso singing and catchy hooks over the down-tuned mathcore chaos. Then there are fans that like both sides but often veer towards the heavier style and might wonder if their last effort fell short of the usual standards. After all, this is the band that produced the best metal record of the 2010s with their majestic Juggernaut double album in 2015. Yet there was something about 2023’s Periphery V: Djent is Not a Genre that missed the mark. “Make your mind up: do you want to be the successors to Dillinger Escape Plan or the contemporaries of Bring Me the Horizon?” lamented Scream Blast Repeat in our review of that record. It was the only non-essential LP in their remarkable catalogue. They’re now on album number seven, and the question is an uncomfortable one. Have the prog metal sensations of the last decade come unstuck in this one?
The answer is no. If anything, Periphery have retooled their sound and changed their mindset. People expecting Periphery VI will be surprised at Misha Mansoor and co.’s drastic 180-degree turn in their songwriting process. This time, the lyrics came first and many of the songs started from jams in the rehearsal studio inspired by abstract visual imagery beaming from the walls. The idea came from drummer, Matt Halpern, who confided in his bandmates that he had a lot to say about human loneliness. Why not ditch the sequential album series and do twelve meditations on solitude and isolation? The result is a stunning emotional force of complex metal music boiled down into an intelligible format that knows no rules but somehow remains accessible.
Opener, ‘Obsession’, is what happens when a band go for the impossible of writing reverb-drenched pop with spasms of black metal fury. It shouldn’t work, but it does. The boys can thank vocalist extraordinaire, Spencer Sotelo, for this. Nobody in metal is doing what he does here: writing and performing heartfelt vocal melodies that could rival a lonely George Michael while jumping into a pit of insanity in the harshest dynamic shifts. Yes, you heard that right, and no, Periphery have not mellowed either. The crunch of ‘Talk’ and the might of lead single, ‘Mr God’, are as brutal as anything in their catalogue. Indeed, the latter contains the finest breakdown riff of the year even if you need a mathematics degree to work out the symmetry of the double-kick drums.
Periphery will always be a technical metal group, but the most notable transition is how they now value songwriting and the poignancy of their lyrics as high as the fretboard trickery that defines them. It might be that it no longer does. If you’re in your forties, life is drifting by, and you read the lyrics to ‘Unlocking Myself’, you might see something that speaks to you. “It’s been a long time in the chain / So I’m unlocking myself / Tired of trying to run away,” laments Periphery’s singer with a sorrowful glance at the ceiling. See if you can remain unaffected by the melancholy of ‘Neon Valley’ when Spencer belts out the chorus: “I’m screaming, “Take me” / From a world so bleak, to the god, we drink.” Apart from Tesseract, there is no artist in metal trying to inject fragile human emotions into the genre. And these chorus deliveries are not the tripe tuneless metalcore that most people over the age of twenty-one will shun. ‘Heaven on High’ is as charismatic as a young Mike Patton unleashing The Real Thing on the unsuspecting world of rock in 1989. Penultimate track, ‘Everyone Dies Alone’, might even be compared to Spiritbox in its delivery and execution, even though Periphery are an undoubted influence on the former.
Of course, this group will always face sceptics in the extreme metal underground. Some believe the band’s fanbase has a language of its own that baffles many, and it seems you need a degree in computer science to fit in at one of their shows. But this is nonsense. Periphery are on a par with the post-metal brilliance of peak Neurosis circa 1992-1999 without discarding their impossible grooves, bone-crunching riffs, and wild aggression. Everyone is welcome to meditate and rock out here, and you’ll need that air guitar and those clawing finger shapes to release your inner demons to the likes of ‘Subhuman’ and ‘Malevolent’.
Only one thing has eluded Periphery in their career so far, and that’s their fruitless attempts over the last three records to produce the ideal calibration of pop melody and muscular metal (as perfected by Faith No More in 1990’s ‘Falling to Pieces’ single) in at least one of their album tracks. They abandon that enterprise here, and that’s wise. A Pale White Dot is a remarkable record and the most mature offering of 2026 so far. There’s no need to hail Stan (excuse the pun), but we should hail Periphery. They take a lot of risks on this album and get a lot of things right. This is a band with the square pegs searching for the square holes.
Kirk Houghton
Verdict
Release Date: 15/05/2026
Record Label: 3Dot Recordings
Standout tracks: Talk; SubHuman; Neon Valley
Suggested Further Listening: The Dillinger Escape Plan – Dissociation (2016), Spiritbox – Eternal Blue (2021), Rivers of Nihil – Rivers of Nihil (2025)