It's a concept album charting an arc from despair and isolation to community-minded conviction, with songs logging sonic references to scenes and genres like shoegaze, noise rock and hardcore ... but they're also marked with an emotional depth and artful dynamic shifts that speak for themselves.

Expressing grief, angst, and uncertainty just as loudly with a croon as a scream is no easy task, but Death Lust archives it masterfully.

Death Lust is an extreme album in which Williams bares his raw, overcome soul over ear-splitting guitar noise. As harrowing as it can be, it’s transcendent rock music that feels unparalleled so far this year.

Death Lust is the sound of a band who has had enough being put down, pushed around and generally told to conform to a society they never really wanted. It’s the sound of disaffected youth demanding to be listened to.

For all its sorrowful subject matter, Death Lust is an often rousing rock record that answers Williams’ disarming admissions with muscular displays of fortitude.

Death Lust is an exorcism of youth's most dramatic rehearsals, as well as, musically, an exercise in a concise adaptation of sharp '90s alt-rock between the harder side of Smashing Pumpkins, the softer side of Deftones, and the melodic end of post-hardcore. It has a way of speaking frankly and directly to the vulnerable old nerves that we still carry under our skin however weathered and toughened on the outside.