Hatebreed will bark, bash and blaze, pounding its way through blurry and galloping 16th-note riffs. Shrapnel, pulverization and blunt-force trauma are part of the sonic aesthetic.
The enduring New Haven metalcore outfit sounds like they’re still not exactly looking on the bright side on their most recent record, “The Concrete Confessional,” released last year. The title captures the band’s goal of, say, getting something off one’s chest, and doing it in a heavy-as-hell, indestructible fashion.
On the album there’s a sense of raging frustration about political corruption, the loss of the American dream, the general failure of empathy, an atmosphere of spreading chaos, moral decay, and a kind of creeping hopelessness. Basically they feel like everybody else in 2017.
Hatebreed is composed of long-haul misanthropists, though, having made grim music since 1994. Don’t expect them to turn around and make a sunshiney psych-pop record anytime soon.
Hatebreed plays Toad’s Place, 300 York St., New Haven, on Friday, Dec. 8, at 7:30 p.m. $29. toadsplace.com, 203-624-8623.
