Album/EP

Onslow - Onslow (EP Review)

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Heavy Metal Wordsmith

Jun 30, 2021

7 min read

Onslow – Onslow EP
Released: July 2, 2021

Lineup:

Sean Harmanis // Vocals
Scott Kay // Guitar

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Onslow’s debut EP is going to take Australia by storm. The newly created Perth band features Make Them Suffer frontman, Sean Harmanis, and Voyager guitarist, Scott Kay, and this is a match made in musical heaven if I do say so myself.

As an opening track of Onslow’s self-titled EP, ‘Saving Face’ is brilliant. The intro starts in your right ear and then morphs into full sound, building anticipation with repeated riffs and building drums. We have strong, sweet vocals with harmonising in the background, and oh yes, the screams. Do you have goosebumps, too? The entire structure of this song is beautiful, and Sean’s clean and unclean vocals are incredible; the distant screams and killer riffs really carry this song along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAAehoLhpFs

The perfect song does not exi—enter ‘Let Me Rust’. This is the kind of song you could mosh and also slow dance to. I’m going to be bold and say that this could be a wedding song for some metal people in the future, it just works. It has a certain groove to it with well-placed screams that punctuate the melody, and clean vocals that give off an angsty, nostalgic feel. Whereas ‘Gauze’ is the most dissonant song on the EP. It still has soft moments, but it lets loose a bit more than the other tracks and has a wild vibe during Sean’s screams.

‘Limbs’ has a great contrast between the verses and chorus, they calm us down and then they rile us up with that phat riff. What a tease! And that guitar feature? Oh boy, that’ll swim around in your head for days. Now, ‘Freddie Mercury’ is a song you really need to sink into. I mean, you need to feel weighed down by blankets, have a warm drink in your hands, and just close your eyes. Soft, clean vocals float along the guitar melody, and slowly morph into something more emotional and rough. I don’t know why it’s called ‘Freddie Mercury’, but I do know that he’d be proud to be the namesake of this song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB60_PzRbpc

While each song proves its brilliance by itself, it’s important to recognise that as a whole, Onslow’s self-titled EP is structured in a way where it hooks you in from the beginning and carries you over the troughs and peaks of the EP.

I’ll say it again, Onslow’s debut EP is going to take Australia by storm. The production is impressive, the vocal performance is skilful, and the melodies take you on a journey you didn’t realise you needed to be on.