The key to The Acacia Strain’s longevity is this: they keep the jams as brutal as possible. Storming out of the Massachusetts metalcore scene in the early 2000s, the original septet earned street cred for death-metal-informed dirges fuelled by a triple-guitar attack and featuring growler Vincent Bennett’s cosmic-scale nihilism. Their first half-a-dozen albums, including the 2010 commercial breakout Wormwood, helped popularise deathcore. But as their embrace of doom riffage on 2019’s It Comes in Waves and 2020’s Slow Decay demonstrate, The Acacia Strain’s brand of extreme-metal bleakness bucks simple classification.