Album Review: Nuvolascura - How This All Ends

A couple of years after what the band has gone through, their return comes with an irate wrangling. ‘How This All Ends’ not only exposes the band’s creative growth with tuneful and tonal refinements, but it also amplifies the vicious anger that ultimately scathes its targets.

The years since the pandemic lockdown and the post-cancer treatment that shook so much to Nuvolascura’s core, the world continues to erupt, piling up more fear and worries that the band now has to confront head-on. Find a way to keep on surviving and fight back. ‘How This All Ends’ is a return into that nerve-wracking chaos, where the fear that continues slithering on their surroundings needs to be stomped out, with the acknowledgement that looking for more collectives is required in order to bite back against the political powers that run the world, and the disgusting amounts of money and weapon-heavy organizations that will be used to create genocidal torture and manipulative tactics that only puts so many people under a vulnerable state. It only makes the usual fractured, free-flowing style of writing gain more weight and impact. Injecting even more venom into the lyricism that targets the powerful structures that needed to be disrupted.

And so, that evocative fury only intensifies as the band expands upon their screamo and emoviolence tangents. Less about the quiet and loud contrasts, more focus on the barrage of frantic anger that’s expressed in the band’s most melodic compositions to date. All within tones spanning shambling noise, cleaner melodic passages, and buzzy guitar shredding that, despite succumbing the bass lines at spots, push more variation to these blistering yet frantic tunes as well as uplifting more of Erica’s vicious screams. The noteworthy vocal features of Julia Spewak, SKIPPER, and hynoki amidst the churning guitar riffs of ‘figment of reality’; clearer bass grooves that add more foundation to the ray of punishing melodic segments across ‘cordiform projection’ and ‘ex cryptids’; mathcore shifts that only pulses into the rippling blast beats of ‘why we never returned to the moon’; reverberating noise that swallows up the backhalf of ‘if at all’; and the 6-minute closer ‘polar destinies’ that effectively applies more melody and firepower throughout some snappy transitions all over the song.

What ‘How This All Ends’ overall presents is the fury that’s most needed in the dire spaces today, where Nuvolascura uses all their pent-up anger and lashes it all to political constructs whose abuse of power needs to be screamed upon with righteous wrath. All the while, they continue to creatively grow as a band, putting more emphasis on developing their tunes to become melodic, distinctive, and powerful. In a time where the road to a cynical demise comes plentiful, Nuvolascura shrieks, and ensures that the chance of occurring is dissipated into dust.

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Favorite Tracks: ‘why we never returned to the moon’, ‘figment of reality’, ‘if at all’, ‘cordiform projection’, ‘ex cryptids’, ‘polar destinites’

Least Favorite Track: ‘before you disappeared’