Nagusame are not reinventing melodic metalcore on I Want To Leave. They wear their influences openly, and anyone familiar with Shai Hulud, Misery Signals, or early-2000s metalcore will hear them almost immediately. What keeps the EP from feeling like simple nostalgia is what Nagusame does with those influences, especially the guitars.
The guitars are what stay with me when I Want To Leave ends. Clean leads float and flutter over the distortion underneath, bringing to mind the way Shai Hulud interlaced melody and heaviness on Reach Beyond the Sun. There is an anxiety to that relationship. The band constantly sounds like it is pushing toward something bigger, with those melodies giving the heavier passages an emotional weight beyond the distortion itself.
That approach is established immediately on the opener “L’Appel du Vide.” The song is practically structured around its clean guitar work. The heavier distortion sits underneath while the melodic guitar stays out front, almost accenting the weight beneath it instead of competing with it. Those leads drive the songwriting, giving Nagusame a way to approach a familiar sound that still feels worth following.
The love for that sound is obvious across these six tracks. Shai Hulud and Misery Signals are easy reference points, and plenty here recalls early-2000s metalcore. I mean that affectionately. You can tell these guys have a serious love affair with this music. More importantly, you can hear it in the guitar arrangements rather than simply being told it through familiar breakdowns and genre tropes.
“Kick ’Em in the Maslow” is the gem here. A soft opening gives way to an explosion, then a spoken-word passage that leads into a beautifully executed stretch of heavy, melodic passage that’s easily reminiscent of Counterparts. Poison the Well also comes to mind, especially in how the song builds toward its larger moments. The breakdowns feel deliberate. They hit because the band actually earns them.
This is also where the vocals work best for me. Across the EP, the delivery leans toward a raspy hardcore bark, and I am still not completely sold on it. It can sound thin, and at times it gets swallowed by everything happening around it. On “Kick ’Em in the Maslow,” though, the vocalist stretches his delivery out. He sounds more urgent. More pained. There is something there that I would really like to see and hear them explore further. The mix does not always help. Those clean guitars shine at the forefront, but there isn't enough low end underneath them. It takes some of the physical impact away from the breakdowns even when the arrangements have already done the work to make them land emotionally. You can hear the density, but you cannot always feel it. Give those guitars some more weight underneath them and the entire push and pull gets more dangerous.
Each track also seems to follow its own path. Loss, isolation, and desolation create a shared mood, but I Want To Leave ultimately feels more like six individual songs than one coherent release. That is not necessarily a problem. I do not need a concept from a six-song EP, and I actually like that the tracks have individual identities. It simply sounds like a band still figuring out how all of these ideas fit together.
And that is really where Nagusame leaves me: interested. I don’t think I Want To Leave tells me how good Nagusame are. I think it tells me how difficult their ceiling is to predict. There are enough ideas here, and enough moments where those ideas really connect, that I’m far more interested in what this band could become than the score alone might suggest.
