Archers – Temporary High – EP Review

8th June 2025 0 By Jon Deaux

It begins with a whisper in the drywall, a phantom voice humming “Better Off” like a nursery rhyme recited by a dying star. ARCHERS — no, not a band, a convulsion — rip through the cranium with this, their second EP. Temporary High is a record that sounds less like music and more like an exorcism recorded on reel-to-reel, played backward through the teeth of a possessed cassette deck.

Track One: “Better Off” is a martyrdom in 4/4 time, flaying the listener with serrated riffs while vocalist Aidan (or is it a prophet in convulsion?) howls like he’s choking on holy water and blood. The breakdown doesn’t drop — it plummets, dragging you through drywall and baptismal font alike.

Then comes “Wide Awake”, a night terror set to tempo, the sound of sleep paralysis given distortion pedals and a grudge. The guitars are less instruments and more scalpels, carving Morse code messages into your temporal lobe. The chorus is a hymn for the chemically unsound, sung by a choir of wolves who just learned heartbreak.

“Safe Now” lies — it lies. It’s not safe. It’s a gaslit waltz through barbed wire memory, all clean vocals smeared in mascara and rage. The ghost of 2007 post-hardcore lives here, but it’s been embalmed in pitch-black resin and left to twitch in the attic.

By “Never Enough,” the walls are bleeding again. The tempo shifts like a heart monitor spiking at the sight of an old lover. There’s a duality here: the scream and the silence, the want and the wound. ARCHERS turn desperation into weaponry, every lyric a cracked mirror held to your throat.

Closer “Crooked Smile” is a deranged lullaby, a love letter written in static and licked shut with razors. It spirals — slow at first — until the whole song convulses into a tornado of feedback and fury, like the band tried to set fire to their own shadows and succeeded.

Temporary High is not an album — it’s a fever, a glitch in God’s design. Imagine if Dillinger Escape Plan had a baby with Underoath during a séance, and that baby grew up screaming in its sleep. ARCHERS are not knocking on the door of metalcore. They’ve torn the hinges off and are rearranging the furniture with bloodied hands.

By the time the last note decays into static, you’ll be grinning a crooked smile of your own, wondering if it was music or if the house just screamed back.

Score 9/10