Review: “Catalyst” EP by SleepWalker from Al Bristow!

A huge amount of records have come out recently that have a lot Nu Metal influences. Unfortunately when you mention Nu Metal, the first things that generally come to mind are bad lyrics, cringey attitudes and masks. Luckily for us, when I say there are huge Nu Metal influences on SleepWalker’s new EP Catalyst, I mean the great parts of Nu Metal – the epic, feel-it-in-your-gut low tuning of KoRn, the scratchy, harsh tone of Slipknot and even the cool, chilled, mainstream attention grabbing bridges of Linkin Park.

The first song from Catalyst, Shattered Reflection, dives into all these influences straight away with no apologies. And it shouldn’t, it’s well executed and SleepWalker have put together an all round modern sound. There’s touches of Architects, Periphery and Tesseract to bring in a melodic sound to these influences without using too much of the technical side of these bands, which I feel they could have but the mix is just right. Even with The Disconnect‘s James Whiddett appearing on the single Pieces to bring some rapping into the EP, this is not a Nu Metal record.

Catalyst is a more chilled out version of a Metalcore EP. There’s the drifting landscapes in the background a la Devil Sold His Soul appearing all over the album which adds a really great depth and the vocals from Sam Salkeld really put it a notch above the competition. The quality of this EP is none more prominent than on the track Worthless. This is a real stand out track and I already thought this record was great before getting to it. The addition of this song lifts the whole EP up. The chorus is incredible, it’s powerful and catchy as hell while also including almost every influence I can hear in the entire record. A great EP all round, but I would definitely start with Worthless [8/10]