Sleeping With Sirens - An Ending in Itself LP record (black, white, and red swirl vinyl)

Some bands get to album eight and tread water. Sleeping With Sirens are not one of them. Across 2019’s How It Feels To Be Lost and 2022’s Complete Collapse, they’ve restored the energy that their more pristine mid-2010s output lacked, but it’s now that it feels like that harder edge is flecked with gold. An Ending In Itself is both the culmination of the emotional journey of those last two records and an arrival at a summit they hadn’t reached before – not just in the last half-decade, but potentially across their whole lifespan as a band. Throughout, they seesaw neatly between their classic sound and flashes of the new. The opening title-track is SWS turned up to full blast – agile riffing, all-consuming emotion – et cetera, with an abrasive twist in its climax that anticipates the heaviness to come elsewhere on the record. The elegant sway of the waltz-like Forever/Always pledges never-ending devotion, while Left on Repeat’s riffs thunder beneath some surprising yet slick rap-like delivery from vocalist Kellin Quinn that works far better than it should on paper.