Self-titling an album five records into a career is a strange choice. Some bands do it as a soft reboot, others almost out of habit. When ERRA did it in 2021, it read as something more deliberate: a statement that this record was the truest, most complete version of who they were as a band. Looking back, most fans and critics agree they backed that decision up — this is the album a huge chunk of the fanbase still points to as ERRA's definitive sound, the one that gets recomme

Metalcore's guitar tone has never really been one sound — it's a genre that stretches from mechanically precise djent riffing to atmospheric, almost shoegaze-adjacent textures, sometimes within the same band's discography. The records below aren't just heavy for the sake of it; each one represents a moment where a band's tone became genuinely inseparable from their identity. Here are five guitar tones that shaped where metalcore and progressive metal have gone. 1. ERRA — Drif

Architects sit in a corner of modern metalcore that's easy to describe but hard to actually execute: technical enough to satisfy the progressive metal crowd, melodic enough to fill arenas. What's easy to miss is that a lot of that melodic quality doesn't come from separate lead sections — it's baked directly into the rhythm guitar itself. Architects write riffs that carry real melodic movement while still functioning as rhythm parts, which means the rhythm tone has to do doub