My Ticket Home – “unReal” (Spinefarm Records)

Forget everything you know about My Ticket Home because everything you think know is about to change. Often associated with the modern nu-metal movement, My Ticket Home has cast off the shackles of genre classification with their latest album unReal, a moody alt-metal journey that represents a newly matured sound for the band. But that’s not to say that My Ticket Home suddenly forgot how to be My Ticket Home (lead single “Thrush” is a perfect blast of the band’s newfound Deftones-adjacent sound, “Flee the Flesh” is a thick slab of dense, layered alt-metal, “Flypaper,” the album’s heaviest track, sounds taken off of the bands 2013 Strangers Only album thanks to churning guitars and frontman Nick Giumenti’s all-too-memorable bark, “Hyperreal” combines hypnotizing melodies with aggressive tones before devolving into a mixture of screams and reverb, “Redline” and “Gasoline Kiss” up the badass quotient of unReal thanks to waves of heady riffs). Perhaps the strongest attribute of unReal is its willingness to push boundaries (“Time Kills Everything” introduces dissonant and hazy atmospherics, “Cellophane” is dark, ominous and entirely powerful, “Down Life” is a dejected slice of gloom and despair, “Melancholia” explodes with explosive outbursts of emotion), succeeding time and time again in blurring genre lines. unReal is captivating, at times breathtaking, and well worth the four year wait.

Go Download: “We All Use”