PRESIDENT ARE OUTSTANDING ON CINEMATIC DEBUT ALBUM ‘BLOOD OF YOUR EMPIRE’

ALBUM REVIEW | PRESIDENT – BLOOD OF YOUR EMPIRE by Chris Watt

There are very few bands who arrive with quite as much baggage as PRESIDENT.
Before the music had even been properly heard, there were the masks. The symbolism. The religious imagery. The deliberately anonymous identities. The inevitable comparisons. The internet theories. The expectation that this mysterious British collective was either going to become the next great thing in alternative metal or disappear beneath the weight of its own mythology.

Now comes the part where the music has to justify the theatre, and, for the most part, Blood Of Your Empire does exactly that. This is not a perfect record. It doesn’t need to be. What PRESIDENT have created instead is a debut that feels genuinely ambitious, occasionally strange, frequently enormous and most importantly, like a band still figuring out exactly how far they can push their own formula.

Across ten tracks, PRESIDENT throw metalcore, alternative rock, electronic music, pop sensibilities and industrial textures into a rather volatile blender. The result is an album that can go from a gigantic guitar riff to an electronic pulse to something resembling a stadium anthem without asking permission. Thematically, it’s even heavier.
Faith. Mortality. Religion. Power. Suffering. Existential anxiety. Not exactly the standard material for a band who have only been around for a couple of years, but then PRESIDENT have never behaved like a standard band.

Opening with ‘Angel Wings’ is a smart move. There’s no gentle introduction to the PRESIDENT universe. The guitars arrive with purpose, the production feels enormous and the song immediately establishes the collision between vulnerability and aggression that runs through the record. It’s a turbulent opener, but beneath all that weight is a surprisingly melodic core.

The central question of the song – seeking protection, hope, or salvation while simultaneously questioning whether any of those things actually exist – beautifully establishes the album’s existential tone. PRESIDENT understand something important here; a song doesn’t have to be complicated to be emotionally complicated. ‘Angel Wings’ is relatively direct musically, but the emotion underneath it is messy, desperate and uncomfortable. It’s the sound of someone asking for help while already suspecting there might be nobody listening.

‘Angel Wings’ establishes the emotional landscape, but ‘DOOM LOOP’ throws the listener directly into it. This is PRESIDENT at their most hypnotic.

The electronic elements are particularly effective, giving the track an almost mechanical momentum while the guitars provide the necessary physical weight. There’s a strange contradiction running through the song. It feels simultaneously huge and claustrophobic and that suits the subject matter perfectly. The idea of being trapped inside the repetition of existence – the feeling that time keeps moving regardless of whether you’re ready for it – gives the song a sense of inevitability. And then there’s the chorus; it’s enormous. This is where PRESIDENT’s arena ambitions become impossible to ignore. You can already imagine thousands of voices shouting the title back at the band. The danger with songs like this is that they can become overly polished, but ‘DOOM LOOP’ gets away with it because there’s still enough dirt underneath the surface.

If PRESIDENT were looking for a song to explain their entire aesthetic to somebody who had never heard them, ‘dark heaven’ might be the one. Even the title tells you what you’re getting: light and darkness, faith and doubt, salvation and destruction. The track opens in distorted, almost seasick territory before dropping into an electronic-driven verse. From there it gradually builds towards a huge chorus, with the guitars and electronics working together rather than fighting for space.

It’s also one of the album’s strongest examinations of religion. What makes it work is that PRESIDENT don’t simply turn faith into a cartoon villain; there’s conflict here. The narrator isn’t just saying, “religion is bad”; they’re asking what happens when something you once believed in no longer provides the answers you need, and that distinction gives ‘dark heaven’ considerably more emotional weight. Musically? It’s massive. This is the sort of song that makes you understand why PRESIDENT are already being talked about in terms of much larger venues.

‘Pink Noise’ is where the album starts becoming particularly interesting. Rather than simply piling more guitars onto the formula, PRESIDENT lean further into electronics. Synths flutter and pulse around the song, constantly changing the atmosphere while the guitars provide the anchor. The track feels less straightforward than the opening trio, almost as though PRESIDENT are deliberately testing how much they can distort their own sound. It’s a clever decision because if Blood Of Your Empire had been ten versions of ‘Angel Wings‘, it would have become exhausting very quickly. Instead, ‘Pink Noise’ gives the record some breathing room. There’s still weight here, but it’s the atmosphere that does the heavy lifting. It’s perhaps one of the songs that benefits most from headphones, and the further you get into it, the more little details start revealing themselves

‘Mercy’ might be one of the most immediately accessible songs on the record.There’s a tremendous sense of melody running through it, but PRESIDENT never completely surrender the heaviness. It’s another song built around contradiction with the title suggesting compassion and forgiveness, yet the music carries a darker emotional undertow.
That duality is becoming one of PRESIDENT’s greatest strengths. They don’t seem particularly interested in straightforward emotional answers; instead, they keep asking questions:

Can somebody be forgiven?

Can you forgive yourself?

Can faith survive doubt?

Can something beautiful emerge from something terrible?

‘Mercy’ doesn’t necessarily answer any of those questions, but it doesn’t need to. Sometimes the question is the song.

‘Sleepwalker’ is where the album really starts to feel like it was built for the stage. Opening with a cynical spoken sample before locking into a driving rhythm, eventually giving way to softer vocals and an enormous chorus. That chorus is the key. This is a proper hands-in-the-air moment; the sort of song where the vocalist can stop singing and let an entire room take over. There’s a confidence here that wasn’t always present in PRESIDENT’s earliest material, but the band clearly understands their audience now. They know when to hit hard, and they know when to pull back, but crucially, they know when to let a melody do the damage instead of another breakdown. The electronic touches also add another layer to the track without making it feel unnecessarily complicated, and it’s one of the album’s most obvious live weapons.

‘Dionysus’ is the odd one out, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Fans of PRESIDENT’s earlier material will recognise it, as the song that originally appeared on King Of Terrors. The new version, however, gives it a considerably heavier treatment: the guitars are deeper, the vocals have more grit and the production feels larger. In many ways, it’s the Blood Of Your Empire version of a song that already existed rather than a completely new chapter, and that’s where the only real frustration lies. On an album otherwise packed with new material, one can’t help wondering what PRESIDENT could have done with another completely fresh track. Still, the reworking makes sense sonically. Placed in the middle of this album, ‘Dionysus’ sounds far more comfortable than it did as part of the band’s earlier story.

Now things get weird, but thank God for that. ‘This Will Divide Us’ is where PRESIDENT stops playing entirely by the rules established during the first half of the album. Robotic vocals, dramatic piano and a saxophone appearing seemingly from nowhere, it’s an unexpected combination, but that’s exactly why it works. The song feels less like a conventional metal track and more like PRESIDENT deliberately pulling apart their own sound to see what happens.
There is something almost theatrical about it, not theatrical in the sense of simply being grandiose, but in the way different musical elements are introduced almost like characters.

It’s also one of the moments where the album feels genuinely adventurous rather than simply polished. Will everyone love it? Absolutely not. But I’d much rather hear PRESIDENT occasionally take a swing and miss slightly than play it safe for 37 minutes.

On paper, ‘Hate Figure’ sounds like it should be devastating. A shorter, more muscular track featuring Ando San should provide the record with a final burst of aggression before the closing statement. There are certainly moments where PRESIDENT sounds enormous, but compared with some of the album’s more adventurous material, Hate Figure feels slightly more conventional. The swagger, heaviness and attitude is there, but it doesn’t quite have the same emotional pull as ‘Dark Heaven’ or ‘Sleepwalker.’ That doesn’t make it bad, far from it. It’s simply one of those songs that finds itself surrounded by more interesting moments, but then, when you’re competing with a track involving piano, saxophone and robotic vocals, you’ve got a difficult job.

And then comes the closing track, ‘White Devil’. Four minutes and twenty-three seconds of PRESIDENT attempting to leave us with one final question rather than one final answer.

It’s an unusual closer. The piano provides a strange backbone, and rather than giving us the enormous final explosion you might expect from a modern metal debut, PRESIDENT opt for something more fragmented and unsettling. It’s almost as though the album refuses to end neatly, which, given everything we’ve heard over the preceding nine songs, feels appropriate. There is no tidy conclusion to an existential crisis, or convenient answer to questions about faith. There is no simple explanation for humanity’s capacity for both compassion and violence, so why should the album provide one? ‘White Devil’ leaves the door open, and perhaps that’s the point.

Blood Of Your Empire is not the record that will finally answer the question of who PRESIDENT are, but it is the record that will make that question considerably more interesting.

The masks, mythology and religious imagery remains, but underneath it all is a band becoming increasingly confident in their ability to manipulate atmosphere, melody, heaviness and electronics.
There are moments where PRESIDENT sound like they could fill an arena tomorrow, and then there are others where you can still hear a young band experimenting with what they might become – that’s ultimately what makes this debut work.

It’s ambitious without being completely self-serious, it’s heavy without being trapped by metal and it’s melodic without becoming soft. When it gets strange –‘This Will Divide Us’, we’re looking directly at you – it becomes considerably more compelling.
The biggest compliment you can give Blood Of Your Empire is that it doesn’t sound like a band desperately trying to escape the shadow of its influences, it sounds like a band beginning to understand what its own shadow looks like.

PRESIDENT have spent the last year asking us to believe and now they’re asking us to listen, and after Blood Of Your Empire, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be doing both.

Blood Or Your Empire by PRESIDENT is OUT NOW via Atlantic Records. Listen/Stream the album HERE.

Get your Twickets notifications on as PRESIDENT will embark on a completely SOLD OUT UK/Europe tour in November.

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Chris Watt

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