Who are you when no one’s around? A fair question, posed by the band, "a question for us as much as anyone else, about facing the parts of yourself that only show up when no one's watching…It's about losing control, pulling yourself apart, and trying to figure out who you are.” Indeed, Pincer+ found themselves doing just that following the kind of lineup changes that can often spell doom for a band, but instead the outfit from Perth, Australia came out on the other side reinvigorated. On December 12th, they unleashed the eight-song auditory onslaught Who Are You When No One’s Around and it’s heavy, it’s nasty, it’s often-claustrophobic, and the production is crisp without what I’ve begun to call "gentrifying" any of the naked aggression and visceral fury that is at odds with the sanitized cut-and-paste MacBook metalcore variety of the genre.

"Blue Light Overdose" (video below) is a good case-in-point, with the band assuming the sonic posture of Alpha Wolf meets the Paleolithic man-crushes-another’s-head-with-a-rock-in-a-dispute-over-the-last-mastodon-steak rage of Kublai Khan. To wit, the band states that the song was "written from a place of hate and utter disdain for those who continue to take, while providing no real benefit to anyone. It's definitely one of the more aggressive and to-the-point songs on the album, and the closest in sound to our older material."

“Concrete Lullaby” featuring Noah Thomas of sace6 (who, incidentally, I saw two months ago with Capstan and Don Broco) finds the band doing their best Thrown impression, while "Yours to Erase" hybridizes that Thrown sound with that of ten56. Album opener "Hard 2 Kill" is a combination of Scars for You to Remember-era Varials mixed with ten56. In what is probably the highlight of the album for me, around two-thirds of the way through the song, there’s this really interesting Neurosis-esque part where a drone riff takes center stage to both set up and then morph into a thunderous and distorted breakdown centered on that riff with some disquieting atmospherics added in a bit before the fadeout.

"e n d l e s s" is a savage track that unexpectedly detours into beautiful shoegaze-y territory, proving, perhaps, that fellow Aussie, the author Leah Mether, was correct that “soft is the new hard” (I actually first encountered this phrase in a different context in a music review or perhaps it was an article I read years ago talking about Drake that I can’t seem to find to give proper credit—this, along with the description of former Boston Celtics power forward Antoine Walker as “an enigma, wrapped in a paradox, wrapped in bacon fat”—remain my two favorite quotes that seem to have disappeared into the ether). The band goes back to the shoegaze well on the metallic hardcore meets earlier Gideon title track album closer, most interestingly when they meld that dreamy atmosphere with the band's inherent abrasiveness in a fashion reminiscent of Pupil Slicer's "Fleshwork."

Who Are You When No One's Around marks a rebirth for the band, a tight and focused shot across the bow that doesn't overstay its welcome, expertly executing their brand of metalcore while adding in some experimental touches.

Check them out in their hometown next month on January 24th at the Froth & Fury Festival as part of a stacked lineup including Bodysnatcher, Polaris, Lagwagon, Fit For An Autopsy, and many more.