REVIEW: No Cure - It Is Going To Get Dark
- Julia Stark
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
“How did we get here?” These are the blistering first words and explosive energy on NO CURE’s latest frenzied album It Is Going To Get Dark, an album that boils over with insurrectionary meaning and fury laden through its rhythms as NO CURE examine the world we live in and practically scream “Is anyone else seeing this shit?”. While the recording process saw the four-piece withdraw to a remote cabin as their musical sanctuary, this calm remoteness instead fuelled the intensity in their sound and the shape of their album.
It Is Going To Get Dark is a step away from their previous work, having always drawn from their internal feelings and experiences growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, translating their specific anecdotes into a sound that made their unique stories relatable for all listeners. This time, NO CURE look outward at the world around them, the hopelessness and righteous fury simmering across society, and spit back at the “very top of society” in a brazen album with meaty riffs and scathing lyrics delivered in rampant screams.
NO CURE have maintained their reputation as a band that refuses to look away from the darker side, their latest work seeing them aiming the lens at those complicit and demanding retribution, while also exploring difficult themes of confronting past traumas and your best never being good enough. From the acidic opener When The Spasms Cease and its driving force of call-and-response heavy metal riffs and screams, an immediate marker that this album will get its grip on you and just tighten with each track, it shifts to Oblivion Crusade’s hardcore elements of squealing guitars and Duncan Newey’s relentless drums over layered screams of “good people don’t eat people”, something that shouldn’t need to be said, yet here we are.
Brain Matter Displacement takes on a varied approach to its genres and tempo, racing along for the most part until it drops abruptly to a tempered pace of riffs and weighted pauses, building the anticipation for JAYWAY’s incendiary rapping before it falls back to vocalist Blaythe Steuer’s guttural screams. Barely letting up, we’re propelled into Slowly Turning Blue and its mounting pitch of Aesop Mongo and Kyle Ray’s howling guitars as Steuer addresses past trauma and recovery regression in despairing screams of “just like that it’s like I never left”. Ironclad sees a war of Steuer’s fry screams pitted against hardcore artist Tyler Short’s (INCLINATION) death growls on a backdrop of riffs dripping with venom, while Starved In Sanctuary (My Hands Are In Your Chest Cavity) unleashes a feverish riff, the rhythms changing regularly as a harmonious choir joins in the back before stripping back to an acoustic outro where the emotions fluctuate between yearning and near-nihilistic.
Technical prowess comes into play on My World In Flames as additional guitar subtly shifts the menacing tone of the intro hook, rending screams of “sacrifice will never be enough” ripping through the frenetic beats as it pulls us into a staggering breakdown. Convulsing In the Dark is an immediate assault of slick riffs and drums that feel like a bodily impact, the lyrics exploring the sense that you have to have a purpose to “justify your existence” otherwise what’s the point in being alive. The onslaught continues into Sharpen The Blade as the album continues to hold itself as a hardcore heavyweight contender, Skyler Condor (CELL) adding muscle to the visceral track, before it blends seamlessly into the rampaging Purity Spiral, its screaming riffs and sharp beats in contrast to Steuer’s deep growls and Vincent Bennet’s (THE ACACIA STRAIN) excoriating lyrics.
I Am Still Fucking Straight Edge speeds through like a bullet train, but 50 seconds is all the band needs to get across exactly who they are as people and how they won’t spare their morals for the comfort of others. Everything I Love Is Dead Or Dying is the final knockout strike on It Is Going To Get Dark, delivering a bombardment of hardcore energy and heavy metal elements over climactic screams. From the first words of the album “How did we get here?” to its skin-splitting, eardrum-rupturing ending, NO CURE gives us a light to follow through the darkest moments, the album a reminder to find purpose in life, to still fight for justice but also protect yourself in doing so. “If you listen to this, I hope you find some sort of resolution. It takes active effort and community for the world not to feel so dark.” say Steuer.
Score: 9/10
It Is Going To Get Dark will be released on 10th July 2026 via SharpTone Records.
Words: Julia Stark
Photos: Nick Chance
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