Code Orange – Underneath review

If you were born before say, 1990, and want to understand what things like social media are doing to people who were born after that watershed, Underneath is one place to start off.

Code Orange came together as teenagers and are only into their mid-20’s collectively, but this is already their fourth album, one on which their potential to stretch beyond narrow tribal confines is finally revealed to the world. Smashing together genres – metal, industrial, techno, even tangentially hip-hop – co-singers Jami Morgan and Reba Myers provide alternating perspectives, although neither allows the intensity to ever relent.

The experience is in places a brutal examination of how the looking glass people see themselves in distorts their reality: it opens with a scream of white noise and segues into Swallowing The Rabbit Whole’s jump up aggression, before laying out a suffocating near fifty minutes of bleak, relentless adrenaline shots.

For a record written by people who were raised in this toxic environment and have never known anything else, Underneath is remarkably controlled and precise, in full possession of itself and an ambitious challenge to the bands around them to respond in kind. Code Orange are part of a generation with plenty to say about their existence – and an arsenal of tools with which to express it.

You can read the full review here.