Silent Planet is the only band I know whose lyric booklet comes with footnotes. Real numbered footnotes. Garrett Russell writes like a person who did the reading and it wrecked him, and I mean that as the highest compliment I have available.
“Panic Room” is the one I keep going back to. It’s about a veteran mid flashback, and it doesn’t describe that from the outside like a documentary would. It puts you inside the attack. The room stops being the room. The voice cracks from singing into something that isn’t singing anymore, and your body reacts a full second before your brain catches up. Every single time. I know the song by heart at this point and it still gets me.
Most heavy music asks you to feel the pain. Fine, that’s the deal, that’s the genre. Silent Planet asks you to understand it first, then feel it, and the feeling hits completely different because you know what you’re actually feeling. Anger with sources. Grief with citations. Metalcore that did the homework.
There’s a version of that which sounds exhausting. I promise it doesn’t play like homework. The riffs are ugly in the correct places. The drums hit like a door slamming in a room you thought was empty. Nobody in this band is lecturing you. They just refuse to scream about anything they can’t back up.
I tried describing them to someone at a show once and gave up halfway through the sentence. You kind of have to just play it. So I did, “Panic Room”, volume up, and watched them go completely still somewhere around the two minute mark.
That’s the review. That’s the whole review.