Something crawled out of Australia and it does not want you to feel safe.
Diesect's Hide From the Light is seventeen minutes of suffocation. Not the slow, creeping kind — the kind where something massive clamps down on your chest and simply refuses to let go. This EP is modern deathcore at its most hostile, fusing industrial soundscapes, glitchy electronic textures, and absolutely bone-pulverizing breakdowns into something that feels less like music and more like being trapped inside a collapsing machine.
The opening track sets the tone immediately. A sound bite — perfectly chosen, nail-on-head — and then it just comes at you. No warm-up. No easing in. It hits fast, ends hard, and transitions seamlessly into the next track with the kind of structural awareness that separates great EPs from good ones. This is a band that understands pacing, and on a seventeen-minute runtime, that matters more than anything.
The vocals deserve special attention here. The range is broad — lows, mids, highs, everything in between — but what makes it work is the rhythm. These vocals are fast, percussive, almost syncopated in a way that locks into the instrumentation rather than floating over it. There's a hip-hop-adjacent cadence buried in there, most obvious on "Too Many Scars," where the delivery rides the groove with a swagger that you don't typically hear in this corner of heavy music. It shouldn't work. It absolutely does.
And then there's "Shura." Things slow down. Warbly guitar effects, string slides, whispered passages layered over what sounds like drum machines and haunted circuitry. It's the EP's breathing room — except the air is poisoned. The breakdowns here have a horror-movie-soundtrack quality, the kind of sound design you'd expect from a short film set in the darkest corridors of the Matrix. Machine warfare. Chrome and blood. When the heaviness returns, it feels earned, inevitable.
"There Was Never Light" is where the EP reaches its deepest point. Shorter than the others, it opens with a rising cinematic fade-in that builds into one of the most well-layered breakdowns on the record. This is Hide From the Light at its heaviest — pure darkness and hatred, pummeling you into the ground with zero mercy and zero apology. The title isn't metaphor. It's a statement of fact.
What holds the whole thing together is the atmosphere. The industrial textures aren't decoration — they're structural. Glitchy effects, haunting ambient passages, mechanical drones — they create a sense of claustrophobia that never breaks, not even in the grooviest moments. And there are groovy moments. This isn't wall-to-wall blasting. Diesect knows when to two-step, when to bounce, when to let a riff breathe just long enough to make you nod before the next hammer drops. There's an almost funky undercurrent to some of these rhythms, which sounds insane to say about an EP this bleak, but here we are.
Songs hover in the upper two, low three-minute range, and every single one feels too short — which is the highest compliment you can pay a deathcore track. The structures are tight, the transitions are clean, and the whole thing goes by so fast it practically demands an immediate replay. Gym tested, gym approved. This is the kind of EP that makes the last set feel like the first.
A Deluxe version recently dropped with an additional track, "Four Walls," pushing the runtime to a solid twenty minutes. More of the same darkness. No complaints here.
If you're into what Lorna Shore, Frontierer, and Psycho-Frame are doing — that intersection of technical precision, suffocating heaviness, and sonic experimentation — Diesect belongs on your radar immediately. This is deathcore that refuses to stay in its lane, and it's better for it. Impossibly dark. Relentlessly creative. Over way too fast.
4.5 / 5. Play it loud. Play it again.
Listen to Hide From the Light on Bandcamp.