Apr 4

Apr 4 Album Review : Counterparts - Heaven Let Them Die (2024)

If Counterparts was a person, they’d be sitting in the dark on the verge of tears and muttering through clenched teeth "I ruin everything I touch". For almost two decades now, they have been a relentless force of intensity, introspection, and raw emotional destruction. They have weaponized self-destructive feelings and turned them into a badass catharsis machine that earned them the most die-hard audience. Somehow, Counterpart has redefined and become even more badass on their latest EP Heaven Let Them Die.

Their heaviest, most heart-wrechnng recording to date has them channeling vocalist Brendan Murphy’s other band END.

Released last November, Heaven Let Them Die features six songs and sixteen minutes of pure inferno. Any melodic lifelines they once held onto are gone as the band dives headfirst into dissonance and apocalyptic aggression. The ever growing sense of an impending personal apocalypse is part of the appeal of Counterparts and it feels right that we're reaching the climax of their saga of suffering. It could not end any other way than with everything burning.

From the very first seconds of A Martyr Left Alive, it’s obvious that this is a different breed of heavy. The song strips faith down to its most grotesque reality: sacrifice without salvation, pain without purpose. You’re expected divine rewards, but you end up in agony and yet still breathing. The track teases moments of restraint, pulling back just long enough to make the next explosion of sound even more gut-wrenching. Counterparts has never been about false hope, but here, even the illusion of it is gone.

With Loving Arms Disfigured continues the theme of unanswered prayer and inevitable suffering. The track is deceptively simple—chug-heavy, relentless, suffocating—but its real weight comes from its contradictions. Murphy’s introspective lyrics cut through the muscular sound, like you’re reading someone’s private breakdown set to the most earth-shattering soundtrack imaginable. It’s a song that rejects the very idea of catharsis, which in turn, makes it the most cathartic thing Counterparts has ever done.

Therein lies all the interest of Counterpart’s music: it’s about finding comfort in the wreckage and telling you that everything bad that could happen to you has already happened.

The third song To Hear of War is somehow even heavier than the first two. Riffing-wise it’s one of the most interesting songs on Heaven Let Them Die as Jesse Doreen’s riffing twists and turns, shifting tempos and layering aggression and atmosphere like a surgeon rearranging organs in a body that’s already dead. It's a wildly empowering song as Brendan Murphy rebels against the divine order and embraces his own suffering as a proof that he's alive and in total ownership fo his mind and body.

Celebrate no saviour unaware of my strained voice, he sings. Whether you decide to hang these words on God, the politician failed you or whoever else broke your trust is up to you.

No Lamb Was Lost is another song featuring more elaborate riffing and a firestorm of volume and emotions. It examines again the contradictions and heartbreak engendered by faith. The breakdown is staggering—not just because of its weight, but because it feels earned. In an era where breakdowns often feel like cheap fireworks, Counterparts delivers one that’s a detonation of actual, tangible grief. They shine as a well-coordinated unit, delivering as much as devastation as humanly possible.

The ongoing foreboding on Heaven Let Them Die takes a break on Praise No Artery Intact, a fast, hard and more expansive song than anything else on the record. Brendan Murphy alluded to being kept on a decomposing cross and asks himself obsessively : I remain, Why Remain? I don’t think he compares himself to Jesus here, but the cross is used as a symbol of the suffering inherent to being a human being always trapped in a form of worship of another.

It’s existential horror is musical form.

The closer once again shifts the tempo as it starts with a full minutes of atmospheric guitar, like the flickering embers of a world already burned to the ground. It functions more as an outro to what was already a charged up journey and a declaration of failure of heavens to protect the living. It’s as furiously played as anything on the second, but I love that it was placed at the end as a way to look at the broader picture of desolation the band is evoking on the record.

Murphy screams into the void, a final desperate plea, but the answer is clear: nothing is OK. Nothing will ever be.

I slept on Heaven Let Them Die when it first dropped, and that was a mistake—it would have been on my year-end list without question had I been a little more aware. Counterparts has made a record that doesn’t promise hope, doesn’t promise a way out. Instead, it just sits in the wreckage with you, tells you that everything that could go wrong already has, and dares you to keep breathing anyway. If you need a good cry, an existential crisis, or just a reason to scream until your lungs give out, Heaven Let Them Die has your back.