Gridlink, one of grindcore’s most revered bands, may be gone, but its legacy lives on through the former members, everyone except vocalist Jon Chang. Barren Path’s debut, Grieving, is not a continuation of Gridlink but a new beast altogether: a furious yet melodic death/grind project. The record abandons narrative in favor of raw, unfiltered anger, yet it still carries traces of the melodic sensibilities of the past. Fueled by exceptional performances from each member, Grieving carves out a distinctive voice in a style that has had too little to offer for far too long.
At just under fourteen minutes, Grieving’s brevity comes as no surprise, but it works in the album’s favor. Rather than feeling slight, the nonstop torrent of ideas channels pure aggression and hatred, delivering an adrenaline rush that never overstays its welcome. The brief ambient interlude “Celestial Bleeding” may seem like an outlier, yet it heightens the tension and leads seamlessly into the record’s most melodic moment, “Lunar Tear,” before the fury resumes in full force. Due to the blistering tempos and constantly shifting riffs, the album achieves a sense of completeness despite its concise runtime and singular emotional focus.
Bryan Fajardo’s drumming is the driving force behind these songs. His incredibly fast, natural-sounding blast beats feel like he’s punishing the kit, while his intricate fills inject a level of aggression that the standard arsenal of D-beats and skank beats simply couldn’t match. His repertoire of blast variations is mesmerizing as he cycles through them, always landing on the perfect hyper-fast pattern to match each riff. Far from being distracting, his overactive style forms the bedrock of the album’s relentless aggression.
Main songwriter Takafumi Matsubara sets aside most of his traditional heavy metal influences to fully channel the album’s rage. While this may seem distant from his usual stylistic inclinations, he proves more than capable of crafting death/grind riffs of pure power, pushing intensity past its limits through sheer speed and constant, unpredictable variations. On “Horizonless,” he crams a dizzying number of power chords into a brief span without sounding aimless, while “In the End – The Gift is Death” takes a similar idea and twists it into a secondary riff that gains surprising melodic strength despite its simplicity. What truly separates Barren Path from Gridlink is the use of consonant melody that never undermines the aggression. Tracks like “The Insufferable Weight” reveal flashes of fractured melody surfacing during breakdowns, giving them even greater heft, while “Relinquish” employs a rapid, single-note tremolo riff that maintains the ferocity but briefly offers a new perspective before returning to the band’s brutal foundation.
Vocalist Mitchell Luna, the sole new member of the lineup, delivers a performance that both honors and expands on Jon Chang’s high-pitched wail. He alternates between piercing shrieks and a low, emotionless gurgle that complements the album’s death-metal leanings and its less histrionic character. Meanwhile, Mauro Cordoba’s bass, though often buried beneath the drums, serves as a crucial anchor. By adhering closely to the guitars’ main ideas, he grounds their chaos, stripping away ornamentation to reveal the rawest expression of the riffs’ rhythms and melodies.
Ultimately, Barren Path have delivered another grindcore masterpiece without leaning on Gridlink’s legacy, instead forging a distinct identity from the same raw materials. The future of grindcore, long resistant to this idea, now seems increasingly dependent on technicality and strong songwriting, with unfiltered energy alone no longer enough. Grieving re-opens the path closed by Coronet Juniper, proving there is still space for truly high quality grindcore. Takafumi Matsubara once again reshapes the genre in his own image, adding yet another classic to his body of work and cementing his legacy as grindcore’s greatest musician.
