Forever captures some of the most punishing noise the band has recorded to date, featuring songs rife with sudden transitions to still-harsher textures. Aside from Morgan's battle cries cutting through the tracks, frequent intrusions of industrial-strength electronics make the songs feel like they're being split open from the inside. "Technology is something that I really appreciate, but being someone who comes from hardcore, metal and punk, you're fighting it at the same time," he says. "It's almost like the bridge between those two ideas." The album also shifts to more-melodic passages and an almost serene ambient coda – never losing an inner restlessness – which is exactly the sort of genre estrangement Morgan, guitarist-vocalist Eric Balderose, guitarist-vocalist Reba Meyers and bassist Joe Goldman were hoping for. "When you feel settled in, I want it to just fuck you again," Morgan says. "We tried to do it in a more strategic way than when we'd done it in the past. There's a part in one song where it cuts in kind of like a nightmare, almost like a mental breakdown." That last statement could be referring to almost any of the album's 11 cuts, which add to their menace with a mix designed to match a hip-hop record's ultrasonic peaks.
