Dez Fafara had warned us: this diptych would be the album of his career. Dealing with Demons I arrives loaded with an ambition that goes far beyond simple groove calibrated for festival crowds. We find the usual DevilDriver machinery here, hammering double bass drum, riffs looping until hypnosis sets in, but something darker seeps through in the grain of the voice and the way tracks sometimes stretch beyond the immediate pogo format. The band doesn’t reinvent anything, but it digs its furrow with a conviction that’s felt from the first minutes.
A rage that no longer seeks to please
What strikes immediately is the refusal of comfort. Choruses are no longer systematically designed for collective singing at festivals: certain tracks advance in a straight line, without melodic compromise, carried by a voice that alternates between dry growl and clearer singing more present than in the past. This choice inevitably divides fans who came seeking only the guaranteed circle pit, but it gives the album a more personal tension, almost introspective under the layer of groove metal.
The machinery of riffs, always effective
On the instrumental side, the formula remains identical to itself: riffs that descend into the midrange, a rhythm section that hits ahead of the beat to create this instantly recognizable groove, and breaks designed to make a pit explode. The shortest and most direct tracks work at full capacity as always, with the way the band has of making a simple riff sound like an inevitability. The production, dense and compact, fits well with this writing: the bass makes itself felt without ever stealing the spotlight from the guitars, and the drums crack without excessive digital compression.
The weight of an album conceived in two parts
The problem, if there is one, lies precisely in this double album logic split into two separate releases. Taken in isolation, Dealing with Demons I sometimes gives the impression of a collection of tracks that don’t entirely exhaust their subject, as if certain ideas were waiting for their resolution in the announced sequel. The album maintains a consistency of tone, but it perhaps lacks that reference track capable of immediately asserting itself as a classic from the band, as certain songs from their previous albums had managed to do. You sense a band that perfectly masters its language, but that sometimes plays it on automatic mode on certain more anecdotal passages in the middle of the tracklist.
What remains is an honest album, one that doesn’t cheat on the band’s identity and that assumes its status as the first half of a larger whole. Fans of straightforward groove metal will find plenty to satisfy them here, between riffs that make you want to tap your foot and a rage that hasn’t lost any of its sincerity, even after so many years in the business. It’s not the pinnacle of DevilDriver’s discography, but it’s a solid piece that mainly makes you want to discover how the story closes with the second installment. As it stands, Dealing with Demons I is worth more as a half-kept promise than as a completely autonomous work, and that’s perhaps exactly what the band had in mind when designing it this way.
