This review was commissioned. However, it bears no weight on the score or decision. All reviews are written from an unbiased standpoint.
Industrial metal act Nox Pulso is new to the site but they’ve been featured in at least one major publication in the form of Metal Underground, so that has to count for something. And now they’re being featured here which makes them even more infamous than ever before. The band hails a so-called New Wave of Industrial Metal but I don’t really see anything quite new about this wave as they seemingly combine drum’n’bass energy with the angry efficiency of metal.
Nox Pulso consists of Matt McIvor and Duncan Williams who originally came together in 2022 to create music that would fit in the clubs of 90s cult classics such as Blade, The Crow, and The Matrix. They’ve a decent track record going for themselves as they’ve supported the likes of Auger, Alien Vampires, Fleisch, and more while performing at festivals such as Hard Rock Hell, Depravation, and Resistanz.
All that said they are failing at impressing me on the site thanks to what I would consider muddy production values and a lot of things that either sound stale or stock. The vocals are my first complaint on the single. Picture this. It’s the mid-00s and you’ve just bought your favorite aggrotech band’s CD and you’ve popped it into your dope, two speaker setup. The band starts screaming and it sounds like a demon’s screaming from underneath the Earth as if they’re stuck and can’t get out of the ground. That’s’ what the screaming on ‘No Exit’ sounds like. The vocals are paired up with higher pitched female vox but this doesn’t help; it sounds tone deaf.
Underneath it all I do think that Nox Pulso has an ear for musicianship. The drum’n’bass elements aren’t too bad when cleared out. But half the time the d’n’b elements are buried beneath the horrible vox and a myriad of effects that don’t rightfully belong or mix well either due to production or bad choices. A decent moment where everything comes together is around the one-minute and five second mark. There’s room for the instrumentation to breathe, the singing is parted out, and you can appreciate the rabid guitar work battling the electronic elements. This lasts up until around the one-minute and thirty second mark before it become garbled up in the single’s mess.
What Nox Pulso has made here is a throwback single that does not hit all the correct buttons. In fact it hits a few that shouldn’t have been touched at all and now the whole thing’s gone nuclear. Elements need to be stripped, vox need an upgrade, so on and so forth. Messy song with hints of good ideas.
