Alchemize – Cold Fire (2025)
Hailing from Manchester, England, Alchemize is a five-piece metal band that promotes itself as a fusion of RnB and metal. The extent to which they fuse the forms is debatable. Often, the band sounds more like a juxtaposition than a fusion. At most, with their new single, ‘Cold Fire’, Alchemize paints a thin gloss of RnB on a metal structure.
Opening with an arpeggiating keyboard, the band quickly envelops the sound with emblems of metal: distorted guitars chugging out a rhythm, double-kick drums pelting your ears like emphatic ellipses, and bass grinding away in the lower register. The lead singer, who represents the RnB side, delivers a clean, almost, at times, effeminate tone in a melody that seems less about development and more about emphasising the emotional twists and turns of the lyrics.
“Looking fine on the outside”, he sings, “But I couldn’t be further away.” And later, “My heart’s bruised black and blue/ With this misfortune I’ve accrued.” As the music builds, the band uses the contrast of the different vocalists to enhance the emotional extremes in the lyrics. The one vocalist sings, “I’m feeling cold from your absence.” Then the other answers in the guttural scream of metal, “And the fire of this existence.” A brief bridge-like section brings a quiet moment of perspective singing, “Tethered to this distance/ Sometimes feeling I might regress/ But holding on and trusting the process.”
The use of autotune on the singer is probably meant to enhance the RnB quality of the singer, but in the greater context of all things metal, it seems to emphasise its femininity. One wonders if the band is intentionally setting up that contrast or if it’s just something this reviewer hears. Could it be that RnB is feminine, and metal is masculine? Whatever the case may be, that bridge section reflects the genuine perspective gained by the band. Band member Adam Kenyon comments that the song “came from a place where we were really struggling – trying to keep it all together on the outside, but feeling completely lost on the inside.” But writing the song “helped us make sense of it.”
As a psychological exercise, no one can argue with progress. But as a true fusion of RnB and metal, the band has work left to do to get their sound past the juxtaposition elements to a blend of them.
Find out more about Alchemize on their Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and Spotify.
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