Review by Rick Eaglestone for MPM
Twenty years. Two decades of eyeliner and industrial-sized riffs; two decades of line-up changes, festival mud, genre snobbery and, famously, a broken-down van in a snowstorm that left the band sleeping on a rest-stop floor and forced them to scrap the opening shows of their very first tour before the thing had properly begun. Motionless In White have never been the critics’ darlings ,they are the band you were told, at some point, that you would grow out of, and quietly never did and Decades is their loudest argument yet that longevity in this scene isn’t luck. It’s stubbornness, weaponised into art. The title is not subtle, and it isn’t trying to be. It’s a line scratched in the dirt that reads: we are still here, we built this on our own terms, and we are not going anywhere.
Full disclosure, I came to Decades braced for the seventh-album wobble, that moment where a band with nothing left to prove starts coasting on brand recognition, horror samples, and muscle memory. What I got instead was a record that sounds genuinely hungry. Chris “Motionless” Cerulli and company have spent the four years since Scoring The End Of The World not resting on the laurels of that album’s crossover success but sharpening every edge of what makes them: the industrial clang, the nu-metal bounce, the gothic melodrama, the metalcore violence, all of it folded together with the sort of confidence that only arrives after two decades of doing this and finally, blessedly, not caring what anyone thinks.
It is worth remembering where this band came from, because it makes what they have become all the more improbable. Scranton, Pennsylvania: an industrial, post-mining town whose grey, working-class grimness always sat oddly beneath the corpse paint and the horror-movie glamour, and yet somehow explained it perfectly. Cerulli is the last man standing from the original line-up, and the story of Motionless In White has been one of attrition and reinvention with members lost, sounds abandoned, entire eras shed like old skin. That they have reached a seventh album at all is an achievement; that the seventh album sounds this vital is something close to a minor miracle. Decades carries the weight of that history without ever letting it become a burden.
Decades lands on the band’s twentieth anniversary and lead single Afraid Of The Dark arrived in January to become their first-ever number one on the Billboard Hot Hard Rock Songs chart which is honestly not a bad way to mark the occasion. The guest list alone tells you the company Motionless In White keep these days: Corey Taylor of Slipknot, Skylar Grey, Anthony Martinez of Dark Divine, and Outlier. This is a band that has ascended from Warped Tour also-rans to the kind of act that can pick up the phone and have the frontman of one of metal’s biggest bands say yes.
Decades opens the record by doing the one thing a twenty-year veteran band is entitled to do: it states a thesis. A slow, deliberate build gives way to a chorus that plants a flag, all widescreen production and that unmistakable Cerulli sneer. It’s an overture as much as a song, a statement of survival that sets up everything to follow. You can hear the band consciously stepping back to survey how far they’ve come and choosing to lead with defiance rather than nostalgia. It’s the sound of a band refusing to treat their own history as a museum piece.
log_in//crash_out stylised exactly like that, lower case, and all is where the album shows its teeth about the world we actually live in. This is Motionless In White pointing the camera at the doomscroll: the endless feed, the dopamine slot machine, the slow rot of being permanently online. Musically it’s all jittery electronics and a chorus that lodges itself somewhere behind your eyes, and lyrically it captures that very modern feeling of logging in whole and crashing out hollow. It’s the most of-the-moment thing here, and it works because the band commit to the bit completely rather than treating technology as a lazy villain.
R.I.P. (featuring Skylar Grey) is the graveyard anthem, and it is a masterstroke. Bringing in a songwriter of Grey’s pedigree, someone who has written for Rihanna and Eminem could have felt like a grab for daytime radio, but instead she and Cerulli trade lines like two ghosts haunting the same crypt. Her voice provides an eerie, almost hymn-like counterweight to his snarl, and the result is one of the most instantly memorable choruses the band have ever committed to tape. It’s catchy in a way that feels dangerous, like a funeral you actually want to attend.
Fight Like Hell snaps the record back to first principles: this is a metalcore band, and here is the breakdown to remind you. All wrestling-promo bravado and revival-tent fury, it’s built for the moment the barrier gives way, and the pit opens like a sinkhole. There is a bluntness to it that I love, no metaphors, no subtext, just the sound of a band telling you to turn your fear into a weapon at maximum volume. It is the track that exists purely to make a room lose its collective mind, and on that brief, it delivers without hesitation. There is a wrestling-entrance swagger to the whole thing ( wrestling was actually my introduction to the band) walking to the ring, pointing at the crowd, daring you to doubt them, and after everything they have weathered, they have earned the theatrics. It’s dumb in the best way, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Playing God (featuring Corey Taylor) is the crown jewel, and everyone involved knows it. Built, transparently, with Taylor in mind, it fuses industrial menace to a chorus with genuine arena scale, and when the two vocalists collide it’s exactly the summit-meeting the concept promises. Taylor doesn’t phone it in, and he doesn’t steamroll the song either as he inhabits it, matching Cerulli’s theatricality with that unmistakable rasp. This is the sound of Motionless In White operating at the very top of their weight class and refusing to be intimidated by it. A properly monstrous track.
All That I’ve Ever Known is the pivot into the record’s emotional core, a heavier, more introspective piece that trades spectacle for weight. There is a real ache in the delivery here, the sound of a man taking stock of everything he has built and everything it’s cost him. The riffs are darker and more deliberate, the melody more mournful, and it functions as the album’s first proper exhale after the sustained assault of the opening run. It’s these moments of shade that keep the record from becoming exhausting, and it is handled with real maturity.
Blood Rave (featuring Anthony Martinez of Dark Divine) is where Decades gleefully leans into the gothic-horror theatre that has always been in this band’s DNA. Fangs, moonlight, curses, the whole velvet-lined coffin and honestly, there is something wonderful about a band twenty years deep still believing in vampires as an emotional framework. Martinez’s guest spot injects an extra shot of venom, and the track pulses with a nightclub-of-the-damned energy that’s impossible to resist. Is it high camp? Absolutely. But it’s committed high camp, delivered with a breakdown, and that dedication to the bit is exactly why it lands.
Love At First Bite keeps the gothic romance running, a companion piece that swoons and snarls in equal measure. It’s all seduction and danger; the kind of track that understands the horror genre has always been about desire dressed up as menace. Coming straight after Blood Rave, it risks tipping the album fully into supernatural melodrama, but it’s got enough hooks and enough self-awareness to earn its place. There is a purity to how unbothered Motionless In White are about being uncool here, and after two decades that fearlessness reads as its own kind of strength.
Count Back From Zero is, for my money, the most affecting thing on the record. It plays like a white-knuckle account of the pull of addiction and the fragile arithmetic of staying clean. the counting, the relapses, the terrifying return to zero. The band strip a lot of the theatre away here and let the rawness breathe, and it’s even more devastating for it. This is Motionless In White reminding you that beneath the corpse paint and the horror aesthetics there are real human wounds being worked through, and it hits with a sincerity that a lesser band would have buried under production. A genuine highlight.
Blood Pact comes barrelling back in with the album’s most primal energy: a short, sharp, no-quarter blast of the industrial metalcore that made people fall for this band in the first place. It’s lean and mean, the sound of the five-piece locking into a groove and simply crushing everything in front of them. After the emotional undertow of the previous track, it functions as a jolt of adrenaline, a reminder that this band can still summon pure physical force whenever they want to. Sometimes you do not need nuance; sometimes you need a track that hits like a closed fist, and this obliges. It’s also a neat structural trick dropping one of the album’s most brutal cuts deep into the back half keeps the momentum from sagging exactly where seventh albums so often start to drift.
Afraid Of The Dark hardly needs my endorsement at this point, it went to number one for a reason. This is Motionless In White as a hit machine, a chorus engineered for maximum lift-off without sacrificing an ounce of their identity. It is dramatic, it is enormous, and it channels a very old, very human fear into something that thousands of people will scream back in unison for years to come. Placed this deep in the tracklist it works as a summit rather than a single, the moment the album fully spreads its wings. Twenty years in and the band are still capable of writing a genuine anthem. Remarkable.
Sunglasses At Night is the curveball a cover of Corey Hart’s 1983 synth-pop staple, reimagined through the Motionless In White lens. On paper it’s an absurd choice, in practice it’s inspired. The band drag the song’s paranoid new-wave pulse into their own industrial darkness, keeping the irresistible hook intact while draping it in menace. It’s the kind of left-turn that separates bands who take themselves too seriously from bands who understand that a little theatrical mischief is part of the point. Covering an eighties radio smash on your twentieth-anniversary record is exactly the sort of gleeful risk a band only takes when they are comfortable in their own skin, and it pays off precisely because they play it straight-faced rather than as a joke. Cerulli clearly relishes it, and so did I.
Hollywood (bonus track) turns a jaundiced eye on fame and the machinery of image, which for a band who built an entire aesthetic out of artifice and horror-movie glamour feels like a fittingly self-aware note to explore. It is a strong inclusion that would have earned a place on the standard edition, all glossy menace and pointed lyricism, and it deepens the record’s running preoccupation with survival and reinvention. Bonus tracks are so often filler, the afterthoughts labels tack on to shift a few extra deluxe editions; this one has genuine bite and a point to make.
Fight Like Hell (featuring Outlier) closes proceedings with the guest-laden alternate version of the earlier scorcher, and it is a canny way to sign off. Outlier’s contribution adds fresh grit to an already ferocious track, sending the album out not on a whimper of reflection but on a defiant clenched fist. It bookends the record’s thesis perfectly: after all the vampires and the doomscrolling and the very real pain, Motionless In White choose to leave you standing in the pit, fighting like hell. Twenty years earned them the right to that ending.
The more time I spend with Decades, the more it rewards the effort. It’s a front-loaded record in terms of singles, but the deep cuts are where it lives — Count Back From Zero and All That I’ve Ever Known hit harder on the third and fourth listen, and the sheer stylistic range starts to feel like a feature rather than a bug. This is an album that could have played it safe, that could have delivered forty minutes of exactly what the audience expected and been perfectly fine. Instead, it swings for the fences and connects far more often than it misses.
For a band that so many people were so certain would burn out, this is a hell of a way to mark two decades. The eyeliner is still on, the horror is still theatrical, the riffs still hit like a hearse taking a corner too fast but underneath it all there is a hard-won sincerity that makes Decades feel like more than an anniversary victory lap. It feels like a band that has finally, fully, become exactly what it always wanted to be. Long may they keep counting.
Decades Tracklisting:
01. Decades
02. log_in//crash_out.
03. R.I.P. (feat. Skylar Grey)
04. Fight Like Hell
05. Playing God (feat. Corey Taylor)
06. All That I’ve Ever Known
07. Blood Rave (feat. Anthony Martinez)
08. Love At First Bite
09. Count Back From Zero
10. Blood Pact
11. Afraid Of The Dark
12. Sunglasses At Night
13. Hollywood (Bonus Track)
14. Fight Like Hell (feat. Outlier) (Bonus Track)
Line-up:
Chris “Motionless” Cerulli – Vocals
Ryan Sitkowski – Guitar
Ricky “Horror” Olson – Guitar
Justin Morrow – Bass
Vinny Mauro – Drums
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3JV49Bg7HDbUeK9DIQlR9G
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/motionlessinwhite/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/motionlessinwhite/
X: https://x.com/motionlesswhite
7/10
Twenty years in, and Motionless In White have never sounded more alive.
