From A Distance: A Hauntingly, Beautiful Album

Published: Sunday, September 13, 2026

by Jack Reed

In 2024, 156/Silence took the metalcore world by storm by releasing their critically acclaimed album, People Watching. The album consisted of huge metalcore songs that began to dip their toes into more cinematic styles. It showed love to soundtracks from Silent Hill and Resident Evil and used those soundscapes to create a creepy and unsettling atmosphere. It became a loved album by a lot of listeners and really pushed them into the spotlight that the band deserves.  

 

Bridging the gap between People Watching and their latest album was the single, “Our Parting Ways”, a tribute to the band’s bassist, Lukas Booker, who tragically passed away in 2025. The song dives deeper into those cinematic aspects, and really lets vocalist Jack Murray shine with his clean vocals. It to me is the perfect bridge to what would lead to their most recent release, From A Distance.  

 

The album is a masterclass when it comes to setting a scene and creating an atmosphere that is present throughout the entire album. There’s a lot more synths on the album that help create different soundscapes that weren’t explored on People Watching. While that creepy atmosphere is still very present, like in my personal favorite track on the album “Collateral”, they also explore a lot of beautiful sounds, especially on tracks like “An Early Exit” and the title track. And that Silent Hill/Resident Evil vibe is still very present, with the intro synth of Cannon Fodder sounding almost one to one like a song from the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack. This atmosphere really helps give not only the album an identity, but each song it’s own personal flavor that you can go back to and indulge in.  

 

Outside of the atmosphere, for me, the main highlight of this album were the lyrics and vocals done by Murray. While People Watching felt like someone observing the outside and almost “reporting” on their findings, From A Distance, funnily enough, feels like it’s an outsider looking into someone’s life from far away. You have songs like, “Proxy Idols”, which discusses celebrity worship, “After Dusk”, a song that tackles emotional isolation, and “An Early Exit”, going after the topic of grief and losing someone unexpectedly. All of this is done through a lot of metaphors that will leave you piecing together your own meanings for the songs, which I’ve always found to be a really cool thing.  

 

The vocal performances, as well, help elevate this experience a ton. You can feel the emotion in every single word Murray sings or screams, with some tracks even sounding like his voice is breaking up at times. The features as well add on to this with Mike Hranica of the Devil Wears Prada, Alex Reade of Make Them Suffer and especially Tony Castrati of Crippling Alcoholism all adding their unique voice to mix, giving their individual songs a nice flair that couldn’t be captured by just Murray doing the vocal part. Murray especially shines with his register as each song he gives a very unique and different vocal performance that makes him stand out on each track. He helps guide the instrumentals and ambience on the entire album and his voice fits this style of music so perfectly in my opinion. 

 

From A Distance is more than just your average metalcore album, it is an album that has a creepy and unsettling, yet almost beautiful identity to it. Every track has its own little flavor that it brings to the table and each of them stand on their own. There’s not a single track on this album that feels like a deep cut, all of them feel like they could’ve been singles for this album. You can feel every bit of emotion in not only the vocals but also the atmosphere. Overall, the album stands on it’s own as not only one of the best albums of 2026, but a lesson for how bands should make music more unique to them. 

 

For more information reach out to Jack Reed at jack.reed@student.shu.edu 

Posted in: reviews,