Album: Forbidden Bounds
Artist: abriction
Year: 2025
Genre: Blackgaze / Thrash
At 23, Meredith Salvatore, abriction mastermind, has released twelve albums (depending on how you count). New artists can release at such a hyper-prolific rate because of accessible recording tools and frictionless access to distribution avenues like Bandcamp. Damian “Sadness” Ojeda likely releases the equivalent of ten to twenty minutes of music per week. Michiru Aoyama releases an ambient album every day. Boris and Bowie were more than 23 years into their careers when they hit album twelve.
Most great artists produce at high volume (consider whether Charles Bissell isn’t actually generating art constantly by unceasing – and unreleased – iteration?) It’s common wisdom that Mozart didn’t hit his stride until around 300 pieces. However, there is an important distinction. Artists can’t improve by simply grinding through three hundred songs. They’ve got to produce while simultaneously feeling like each song is the greatest thing they’ve ever written. One can choose for themselves what to think about some of the most hyper-prolific artists out there: are they exhibiting mastery? Or are they releasing unfiltered journal entries?
Forbidden Bounds curtails any such debate about abriction – she’s in the mastery phase. Her production process has recently hit two slowdowns: First – she’s shifted from electronic compositions to incorporate vocals and other live instrumentation. Second – she’s brought in a collaborator Colin MacAndrew, to play live drums. This is abriction’s third release with MacAndrew drumming and her first full-length. You, as the listener, get to reap the rewards that leaving these songs in the oven a bit longer has provided.
Abriction breaks through the wall and announces her evolution in the first minute of the album. “Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland” is a legitimate thrash-inflected song replete with palm muting, double bass, and a shift in Salvatore’s harsh vocals from shrieking to commanding. Her music still masterfully blends disparate styles, but this time you feel like you’re in the blender. “SHA-512” and “Fall into You” combine fierce tempos with harmonized lead riffs, and the palm muted variation on the riff on “Fall” might just blast your face off.
While Salvatore amplifies, literally, new elements of her sound, she’s not making a break with the past that will leave existing fans behind. At almost exactly the one minute mark of “Tony Hawk” she breaks into a multi-tracked clean vocal melody to remind you who you’re listening to. “December” is something of a throwback to her more digitally-based compositions, and brings some relative lightness amongst the more aggressive proceedings. The only thing she’s backed off on are some of her most overt pop leanings; there’s nothing here that could be (almost) palatable for normies like “Relieved of All Senses” or “Carried” from Banshee. More importantly, though, she preserves her epic song crescendos while only once breaking the ten-minute mark. The moment when her harsh vocal doubles her cleans at the peak of “Tony Hawk” may be one of her finest song endings yet.
And it’s the clearly defined moments, like that climax in “Tony Hawk,” like the harmonized leads on “Fall Into You” that show the power of having amassed such a large catalog. You can’t hit the high notes unless you’ve slogged through a mountain of songs to have an intuitive grasp of what will make a song pop. With Forbidden Bounds, Salvatore has delivered one of the best albums of the year, and it’s hard not to attribute that to the level of detail on this release. Here’s hoping that Forbidden Bounds doesn’t get buried under the weight of abriction’s massive catalog.
