Shadow Work, Despised Icon’s seventh album, is a curious – if not downright dangerous – beast. Whereas lyrically it is vulnerable and introspective, musically it is wildly violent. Singer and songwriter Alex Erian calls it a “rollercoaster”, where the listener is scoured by the black-metal vibes of “The Apparition”, hammered by the concise powerviolence of “ContreCoeur”, and slammed headfirst into the final beatdown of “Corpse Pose”. Erian calls the latter section “Golden-Age-of-Myspace-deathcore-in-2007 shit”.

It’s been six long years since Purgatory, the last Despised Icon album. The end of 2019 was a watershed for Erian. Alongside the demands of his other band, Obey the Brave, he found he was “saturated” and needed to figure out what his life felt like in Montreal outside music – as a better friend, boyfriend and son. His bands had achieved enough renown that it started to get to his head: “I think in order for me to stay grounded, I needed to achieve ego death,” he says.

Erian describes the frame of mind he found himself in as one of “semi-retirement”. He turned 40 in 2020, and pondered the ridiculousness of a forty-something fronting a deathcore band. Slowly, but surely, he began to excavate his personality and do the shadow work which the album is named after. A concept coined by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the shadow self is within us and beside us: a repository for repressed and/or unacknowledged emotions. Erian took himself to a vulnerable place: with that vulnerability came accountability.

Erian originally stepped out from behind the drum kit for Despised Icon’s second album, and his first as vocalist, 2005’s The Healing Process. He could be called the deathcore Phil Collins. Erian used music to express what he kept inside of him. From the “low-level abstract poetry” of that album, he grew more comfortable sharing what he was going through on a personal level. 

“I realized somewhere along the way that it's one thing to make that assessment and let it all out and talk about it,” he says. “But it's way harder to actually implement sustainable change and grow as a human being: to fix these things about you that require a whole lot of energy, and that are normally just swept under the rug. So Shadow Work, to me, is that: it's digging deep.”

When he initially briefed cover artist Eliran Kantor for Shadow Work (who he first collaborated with on Purgatory), Erian suggested a character opening its ribcage, exposing their heart and, with it, a kind of sincerity. The second option was the same character with a crown of thorns. “Jesus beat you to that one,” Kantor told him. Instead, Kantor suggested blending the two approaches into the artist's most (literally) jaw-dropping cover since he depicted a rapist being fed his own castrated genitals on Venom Prison’s 2016 Animus cover.

“The character here is ripping out his jaw,” says Erian, proudly showing me the vinyl copy he’s just received. “So we have a gateway within, with this gaping hole of a mouth, and then he’s coronating himself with the jaw, which is sort of like a crown of sorrow or whatever. And the eyes are dead, but they're looking upwards, and they're very hopeful as well – looking for a sign, looking for salvation.”

The introspective journey is not an easy one. On the title track, Erian reflects that, by revisiting them, “Old wounds have begun to bleed”. On “Over My Dead Body”, featuring Matt Honeycutt of Kublai Khan TX, Erian barks that “Everlasting doubt, lingers like a cigarette” and to “Trust the process/Pain is progress”. There’s defiance in “Over My Dead Body”, whereas third track “Death of An Artist” is more accepting of the personal rebirth he has undergone.

“I'm the same, but different,” says Erian. “I've progressed a lot, and I've become pragmatic, rational. I would like to think that I have better values more and more as I get older.”

The new album was written by Erian and guitarist Eric Jarrin, who also helped Erian build his home studio and learn how to use it. They produced the album together and sweated over the minutiae of its diamond-hard soundworld. There’s a reason it’s three years late. The Despised Icon lineup is completed by drummer Alex “Grind” Pelletier, bassist Sebastien Piché, guitarist Ben Landreville, and Erian's co-vocalist Steve Marois. 

Of all the conscious work Erian’s been doing at the front of his mind, as he puts it, the back of his mind never sleeps. Riffs, rhythmic ideas, and vocal flows all emerge from his subconscious, waking him up in the middle of the night to make voice notes of his ideas. Then the perfectionist takes over: tweaking, honing, polishing. When it comes to his vocal lines, these days he gives himself more grace if every syllable doesn’t actually fit the meter, or he doesn’t nail a rhyme. But regardless, Shadow Work is a highly sculpted album, and pared to the bone. It’s probably the heaviest Despised Icon have ever sounded, feasting on the insurgent energy of a rejuvenated deathcore scene, where Erian shouts out Lorna Shore, Shadow of Intent, Signs of the Swarm and Peeling Flesh as upping the ante in what felt like a cooked genre a few years ago.

Erian holds tight to the thrill of seeing Suffocation’s Frank Mullen wearing a Despised Icon T-shirt in a music video during a period when the band had to tour on the death-metal circuit, getting booed every night. In the early 2000s, the deathcore scene wasn’t properly formulated, but then Job for a Cowboy launched themselves with 2005’s Doom, and soon after Suicide Silence and Whitechapel joined the fray. Just before the new wave of 2020s bands emerged, Erian says he felt “bleak” about his musical future, resorting to cleaner vocals with Obey the Brave, before the deathcore scene went unexpectedly 180 and doubled down on blast beats and breakdowns.

On a trip to Leeds, England, in December 2019 with Obey the Brave guitarist Terence McAuley, Erian had another epiphany. He was always a heavy weed smoker. He took it up when he was twelve and by eighteen was smoking every day. He found it helped him cope and manage his anxiety. But on that trip, they had struggled to pick any up, and he found himself in the airport after two days of no smoking.

“I remember being at the airport with Terry and just feeling that rush of anxiety and I had to close my eyes and then just grab him by the arm and be like, ‘Yo Tez. Just steer me through this, man. I can't handle the situation right now,’” Erian remembers.

But he saw the opportunity, resisted picking up any weed once he was home, and managed to stop smoking completely. Combined with his healthier approach to his career in music, it gave him a solid platform to write smashed-to-smithereens songs like “Corpse Pose”, which writhes and constricts like someone in the midst of an asthma attack. That’s because Erian wrote it directly after having one. For him, it’s a song about “figuring out organic ways, positive ways of coping”: 

“So breathing in, breathing out. Whether it's that, or whether it's a grindcore band that I used to listen to, Nasum, [1998 album] Inhale/Exhale, whatever. To me, it made sense at the time. And then ‘Corpse Pose’ sounds badass [as a title], but it's actually the name of a pose in yoga after your practice, where you just rest and soak in all that calmness.”

One of the defining features of Despised Icon is Erian’s interplay with co-vocalist Steve Marois. Erian provides the hardcore shouts and screams, and Marois the death metal: shrieking, grunting and squealing through the material.  

“Now more than ever, I keep Steve in the back of my head,” says Erian. “I want to make sure that the stuff that I write is relatable to him as well, because he screams that shit with me. And you know when you're screaming, technique is one thing, but emotion is another, and we just push it to that next level.”

One track, “The Apparition”, plays out as a dialogue between the duo. The song negotiates the “cerebral prison” that Marois can lock himself inside. Erian tells me that Marois has had a “rough life”, and prefers to withdraw when things get complicated – isolate himself so as not to be a burden. These occasional disappearances make Marois appear to be the apparition of the title. The gang chant that ends the song is the band’s way of re-embracing their brother.

Has it struck Erian that he might fulfil the role of Marois’ shadow, or vice versa?

“That’s an interesting parallel,” Erian says, thinking for a moment. “He and I are very much different, but on a certain level, for him, it might be isolation. For me, it's just the need to be alone or to feel good alone.”

Shadow Work pays tribute to the band’s considerable legacy in the scene they spawned, honouring those they’ve lost along the way, particularly on “The Reaper” and closing track “Fallen Ones”. But the album burns considerable rubber, locked to the future in what Erian calls a “forward-focused” stance. Far from softening up, they hit harder than ever. The fast parts go at warp speed and the technical parts are giddyingly complex. It all amounts to keeping Erian feeling young.

He tells me in the past that he listened to a record when it was done, shelved it, then came back to it only to critique it. He could have done better delivering that line. They should have played a particular riff twice. That riff wasn’t good enough. But sometimes, the rabid self-criticism clears and gifts Erian some perspective on his achievements.

“I drive myself crazy, thinking and rethinking it over and over again, and then at some point, everything sucks,” he says. “This record sucks, or whatever I just did there sucks. And then I sort of have to crash and burn and force myself to take time off and then revisit whatever I'm doing with a fresh pair of ears or eyes. And that's when it hits me. Holy shit, man. This came out of you. This actually ain't all that bad.”

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Shadow Work, the new album from Despised Icon arrives October 31st via Nuclear Blast Records. Get the album - HERE