Hardcore band RIWEN and their new album "The Cold" are here and ready to pave the way for more fans of Hardcore. So, the question stands, can they convince more people to like Hardcore with this album? Is that album even good from a fan of Hardcore's point of view? There are a lot of questions to answer and here we will try to cover them.

As of the second song on the album, "The Blackest Blood", we are being told "kill yourself". The song itself is short, only spanning a couple of minutes and just being a straight Hardcore Punk song, but it's a little more straight forward for being told to kill yourself than bands like SHINING for instance. "Orcus" is a bit more Doomy of a song, slowed down chugging riffs, but I find the vocals don't match this kind of a song; vocally this song sounds like it wants to go at 100 mph while it's stuck at 20. "Daymares", as silly of a title as it is, as well as "Hades Trail", was one of the better songs on the album - I say one simply because "Daymares" is just an intro and easily could have been put on at the beginning of "Hades Trail" and it wouldn't have made a difference. Instrumentals have a nice build in, using samples from either a show or a movie to build up into the song before finally breaking through to a very Punk oriented song. "Hades Trail" uses different tempos better than any other song on the album and also features really nice melodic harmonies in the chorus.

In the end, it doesn't even matter that I'm not really a Hardcore fan, this album wasn't bad. Some things could have been done better like slight changes to the vocals to match different sections, but that's just my thought. RIWEN and their album "The Cold" is a pretty decent intro to Hardcore if it's something you've been wanting to get into, and if you're like me and it's just not something you're into, then even you might find something to enjoy in this album.