Hypnotize

If the best moments here were just added to mesmerize to create one long double album it would be the best in their discography in my opinion. The highs here (hypnotize, vicinity, holy mountains, lonely day) are some of my favorite SOAD songs. This album is just really inconsistent because these masterpieces are surrounded by songs that are just kind of bland and forgettable. None of this is outright bad, but there’s so many moments where I’m just left thinking “that’s it?”

That being said, this was my first album to ever get into by then outside of the hits and I still love it. It really says something great about SOAD that something this great could arguably be their worst record. I still haven’t heard steal this album so I can’t definitively say it’s that. It just kind of feels like they’re losing their passion, the gas in their tank seems to be low on a lot of these songs. It kind of makes sense that this was their last album.