Tetrarch – The Ugly Side of Me – Album Review
9th May 2025There is a room in your head you boarded shut years ago. You know the one — wallpapered in jawbone fragments embedded in plaster, the whole room grinning with someone else’s pain, echoing with nursery rhymes sung in reverse. That’s where Tetrarch recorded The Ugly Side of Me — not in a studio, but in the crawlspace beneath your traumas.
From the opening riff, it feels like falling down a well, lined with broken CRT televisions, each screen playing your worst memory on loop with the bass turned up until your organs rattle loose. Nu-metal and metalcore don’t quite explain what this is. This is what happens when an open wound learns to scream in 7-string tunings.
The vocals aren’t sung or screamed — they vomit. Bile-laced, serrated syllables flung like curses from a jaw dislocated by grief. It’s the sound of your mirror speaking back, asking you if you remember what you did when you thought no one was watching.
Every breakdown is a panic attack set to tempo. At one point in Erase, the guitars detune themselves mid-song as if they can’t even bear the weight of what they’re saying. The drums aren’t keeping time — they’re punching it, bludgeoning the seconds until they bleed into each other.
Lyrically, it’s less storytelling than confession. Scrawled in something sticky across padded walls. No metaphors, no masks. Just raw, unfiltered psychic pus. A phrase repeats: “I never left that basement.” It comes back again. And again. A mantra or a warning.
By the time the title track rolls in, you’re not sure if the distortion is in the music or your brainstem. The song doesn’t end — it unravels, slowly, like sinew peeling from bone.
The Ugly Side of Me isn’t about anger — it’s about rot. It’s about the fungus growing in the corners of your personality, the mold-black bits of your soul you keep behind polite smiles. Tetrarch didn’t make an album. They built a haunted house in your bloodstream and invited your younger self to live there forever.
Tetrarch has created an album that’s a mirror held up at just the wrong angle, revealing the part of you that never grew up — just festered.
Wear headphones. Lock the door. Don’t let it hear you breathing.
Score 9/10
Track List
1. Anything Like Myself
2. Never Again (Parasite)
3. Live Not Fantasize
4. Erase
5. The Only Thing I’ve Got
6. Best Of Luck
7. Crawl
8. Cold
9. Headspace
10. The Ugly Side of Me
Label – Napalm
Release – 9th May 2025
