Review: Giant’s Knife – At the End of All Things
Style: Progressive metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Black Crown Initiate, Textures, early The Contortionist
Country: Minnesota, USA
Release date: 6 June 2025
Retooling. If you’re the sort of person who assiduously watches sitcoms from their first season, you’ll be familiar with retooling. It’s the process by which a TV show is changed in order to alter a faulty premise into a more successful one, often by removing or adding a character, or changing the tone. Perhaps the most familiar example to my generation would be Parks and Recreation, which was retooled in its second season from a snarky The Office replica into a more heartwarming and slightly cartoonishly humoured show with the introduction of two new characters to incite tensions, both sexual and financial. Other famous examples include Star Trek (the entire cast of the initial pilot was replaced), Dallas (after killing off major character Bobby Ewing, the show suffered a catastrophic nose-dive in ratings and decided to reintroduce dead Bobby by revealing the entire season was a dream), and, of course, Family Matters. Starting out as a blue-collar take on The Cosby Show, Family Matters became completely restructured around the initial one-time character of Steve Urkell (‘did I do that?’) and subsequently turned, as Key and Peele put it, ‘into goddamn Quantum Leap.’1
Minnesotan outfit Giant’s Knife are arguably the Parks and Recreation of prog metal, changing tone a little with the help of two new characters. Their 2021 debut Oracle was a fully instrumental work with a post-djent flavour; heavy riffs but with a melodic focus, with a strong emphasis on flow. On sophomore At the End of All Things, alongside the founding trio (Austin, Rylan, and Tony), the band have found their very own financial and sexual tension-makers in the form of Kyle and Will who both provide guitar work—while Kyle and Rylan unleash the clean and harsh vocals. Will audiences welcome the new cast or are they destined for cancellation after just two seasons, ala every single Netflix show post-2017?
Opening with a nod to their past, the five minute instrumental opener “Wayfarer” provides a throughline from Oracle, contextualising Giant’s Knife new shtick within the evolution of their sound. At the End of All Things truly begins with “Beyond the Reach of Comets” where the vocals finally get to walk on to cheers from the live-studio audience, showcasing the new range of metalcore barks, death growls, and soaring chorus cleans. It turns out that Giant’s Knife with vocals sound more like Textures, and, in the softer moments, like The Contortionist. With stronger production and those harshes guiding them, Giant’s Knife also sound newtons heavier, often veering into the djentrified progressive death stylings of Black Crown Initiate or even, to my ear, Whitechapel.
Soft harmonies befitting the likes of The Contortionist or Tesseract perforate many of the tracks, such as the refrains of “Godfall” and “Beyond the Reach of Comets”; with the atmospheres of interlude “Loading…” and synthy outro palette cleanser “Null” occupying a similar sonic space to the aforementioned bands. “Where Souls Lie Still” almost verges on post-hardcore akin to The Safety Fire with its more anthemic sensibility. These moments are always done, just like the best sitcom comedies, with a powerful sense of tension and release.
Over time, however, we inevitably end up hitting on the usual plot beats and tropes that hold an otherwise promising cast back: the open low-string breakdowns that infect “Beyond the Reach of Comets”, a tendency to stick to a similar tempo for most songs, and the usual filler djent riffs that feel a little lazy, such as the one that plagues “Godfall”. For the most part, these issues are at least interwoven into compositions which tend to evolve over the course of songs, and rarely linger too long on a single idea; clearly part of the legacy of starting out instrumental and needing to keep the compositions moving. By the time the lumbering outro riff of “Molten Core” hits its nadir, you really do feel like you’ve hit the void. Meanwhile, “Destined Death” pushes the instrumental work in the ‘faces in the sky’ section to a delicious extreme, the vocal delivery providing a throughline while the kit is pulverised ever more intensely and the riffs become more frenetic. When Giant’s Knife hit upon an epic clean section or push the complexity of the instruments to further extremes they find their best pay-offs. At other times, like a sitcom where everything has to return to normal by the end, the audience leaves entertained but without memorable moments to hold in their mind.
At a svelte thirty-nine minutes, At the End of All Things runs a tad longer than the average sitcom, but the retooling has put a good show on a new path, one guaranteed to find the Minnesotan five-piece a larger audience. With slightly stronger writing, a willing fanbase, and maybe a guest spot from Henry Winkler, Giant’s Knife’s promising fresh start could blossom into something truly brilliant. Let’s hope they get renewed for a third season.
Recommended tracks: Beyond the Reach of Comets, Godfall, Where Souls Lie Still
You may also like: Rannoch, Subterranean Lava Dragon
Final verdict: 7/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives
Label: Independent
Giant’s Knife is:
– Austin (guitars, programming)
– Kyle (guitars, vocals)
– Will (guitars)
– Rylan (bass, vocals)
– Tony (drums)
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