Fit For An Autopsy

Success hasn’t spoiled Fit For An Autopsy — but as any fan of the New Jersey metal sextet could tell you, there was never much chance of that happening in the first place.

Fit For An Autopsy’s acclaimed 2022 album On What the Future Holds was the band’s highest-charting release to date, becoming the first of their six full-lengths to reach the Top 25 of the Billboard 200. But while some musicians would take such an achievement as a cue to duplicate whatever worked last time, or maybe even tailor their sound to boost its commercial appeal, the band — vocalist Joe Badolato, guitarists Will Putney, Patrick Sheridan and Tim Howley, bassist Peter Spinazola and drummer Josean Orta — simply continued to evolve along their own path.

The Nothing That Is, Fit For An Autopsy’s seventh and latest album (and third for Nuclear Blast), bears no sign whatsoever of commercial concession or rehashed past glories. Instead, the ten-song album finds the band exploring moodier textures and deeper emotions that add new power and dynamics to their already brutal and complex music, while also completely tuning out the ambient noise of passing musical trends and the expectations of the outside world.

Produced by Putney at his Graphic Nature Audio studio in Kinnelon, New Jersey, The Nothing That Is is an album filled with anger, frustration and crushing despair. Songs like “Hostage,” “Red Horizon,” “Lower Purpose” and the pummeling title track grapple with the horrors that the human race has unnecessarily inflicted upon the world, while the epic, introspective closer “The Silver Sun” reflects bitterly upon our uncertain future. Built to be listened to in its entirety in a single sitting, The Nothing That Is flows like the gripping soundtrack to a documentary film of our increasingly dystopian existence.

“Hostage,” the album’s lead-off track and first single, is the straight-up essence of Fit distilled into four minutes and forty seconds — an aurally assaultive post-deathcore howl of rage at being trapped in a world with no real hope of escape. But there’s also plenty of room on The Nothing That Is for the band to draw upon and incorporate a wide array of influences, like the mathematical precision of the early Meshuggah and Decapitated-type riffage that runs through “Spoils of the Horde,” the elements of classic Swedish melodic death metal that surge to the fore on “Savior of None – Ashes of All,” the “get in the pit” hardcore attack of “Weaker Wolves,” and the dark and doomy atmospherics of “Lurch”. And on the ripping “Lust for the Severed Head,” the band’s guitarists simply let loose with a thrilling array of fretboard fireworks.

A ringing wake-up call for humanity and a thoroughly intense listening experience, The Nothing That Is brims with both aggression and melody, its bracing music delivered with the confidence of a band that has honed its skills and forged its sense of purpose through fifteen-plus years of all-out live shows. Sufficiently secure of their place in the metal firmament to let their music go wherever feels right for a particular song, Fit For An Autopsy have delivered what may well be the greatest album of their career.