Four years on from their 2013 debut, The Charm The Fury have upped their game. An angry record driven by a collective distaste for the state of the planet in the 21st Century, underpinned by ferocious intelligence and a heartfelt desire to wake people out of their smartphone stupors, ‘The Sick, Dumb And Happy’ is sure to bring a new fire to the metal world.

This new album is a startling slab of ultra-modern but utterly distinctive metal that shrewdly and honestly redefines what The Charm The Fury are all about. Showing a range from melodic and intimate singing, to full force guttural screaming, singer Caroline Westendorp seeks to demonstrate that a female metal vocalist can be much more than a marketing tool to please the masses. Fittingly, her band mates have clicked into a higher gear and provide the singer with the most vibrant, vicious and joyously metallic of backdrops.

“People don’t listen to metal music to hear this big glossy pop thing, they listen to it because they’re sick of that and they want something different,” says drummer Mathijs Tieken. “So we stripped everything down to the core and worked super hard on that core.” Powered by thunderous grooves and laced with incisive melodies, the vicious opener ‘Down On The Ropes’ and scabrous mosh-metal assault ‘Weaponized’ harness the seminal magic of Pantera and Slipknot and turn it into an invigorating new musical mutation that slams, slays and grips with gleaming hooks. Meanwhile, darker and moodier material like the introspective ‘Blood And Salt’ and the menacing, syncopated riff-riot of ‘The Hell In Me’ take the band into even more idiosyncratic territory, while melodramatic turbo-ballad ‘Silent War’ affirms their elegant mastery of big choruses and emotional oomph. On a lyrical level, ‘The Sick, Dumb And Happy’ brims with mesmerising cautionary tales of self-destruction, the horrors of war and the spread of corruption through the political and financial worlds.

Having established themselves as one of the most promising new metal bands in Europe, the Dutch quintet are determined to make this album count. “There’s a lot of risk involved in doing something like this, but we put a lot of sweat, tears and anti-depressants into this album,” Mathijs concludes. “We worked our asses off in so many ways to get to this point. We just want to be able to focus all our attention on music and touring. You have to work hard and take risks and do whatever it takes to make it happen.”