President – ‘Blood Of Your Empire’ review: polarising pop-metallers serve up an arty and versatile debut

When NME squeezed into President’s inaugural headline show last July, heated online discourse had emerged around the band. One month earlier, the anonymous quartet introduced themselves at Download Festival, overflowing their tent by a country mile despite being booked as an unknown entity. Nepotism objections only increased when a tour with Architects and a deal with Atlantic Records followed. Nevertheless, an obsessive fanbase began to brew; at Slam Dunk Festival 2026, their crowd size at 6pm equalled that of stage headliners Knocked Loose. Their upcoming UK tour, which includes London’s 5,000-capacity O2 Academy Brixton, sold out within hours.

You can’t dispute the real fans driving these numbers. However, others remain suspicious of the authenticity and timing of the band’s masked image and trendy sound. Their first two singles ‘In The Name Of The Father’ and ‘Fearless’ unashamedly leant into an autotune-heavy, alt-pop-fuelled metalcore lane that Bad Omens, Dayseeker and fellow mystery men Sleep Token have popularised of late. The band’s frontman has confirmed in interviews that his identity will always remain secret, hoping people will eventually focus on the “artform” over his true name. During this digital age of unprecedented access to artist’s personalities (where fans sometimes cross lines), it’s not hard to empathise with his self-imposed shield.

With the arrival of debut album ‘Blood Of Your Empire’, attention rightly returns to the quality of President’s music. On 2025 EP ‘King Of Terrors’, the Bicep-tinged odyssey ‘Rage’ stood out from their reliable modern metalcore template, where sabre-toothed guitar riffs often cut through brooding synth lines. This album’s singles largely occupy the same safe haven, with flashes of colour coming through lead guitar trills in ‘Dark Heaven’, the dizzying bridge in ‘Doom Loop’ and the emotional dance pulses that open ‘Angel Wings’. ‘Mercy’ shifts the tempo, owning its Deftones influence with cinematic brilliance as our frontman questions his deity: “Where was your hand when I was always screaming out?”

His conflict with religion recurs across ‘Blood Of Your Empire’, “dancing two-step with the devil” on ‘This Will Divide Us’ after “trying to look away” from those “preaching out lies” on ‘Dionysus’. Complex soul-searching is happening behind the veil, yet President’s visual messaging actually offers fans a very one-dimensional means to engage with the band: here is another faceless figurehead to follow – for better or worse. His expressions of low self-esteem on ‘Sleepwalker’ (“I’m just a shell of myself holding on”) are also diluted by non-musical matters; this time, an awkward spoken-word instruction to “do whatever the fuck you want!”.

But, to that self-indulgent end, the rap-metal of Ando San collaboration ‘Hate Figure’ is a very unexpected twist, as is the playful, topsy-turvy piano on ‘White Devil’. ‘Pink Noise’ flips tingling alt-pop into metalcore and a brief house build, shifting genre at a pace you’d expect from Poppy. It confirms President have blast-off from the modern metal box, even if things feel a little unsteady in album form. To the naysayers who accuse the band of copy and paste, ‘Blood Of Your Empire’ stands tall as a courageous attempt to uncover sonic territory that is truly their own.