Arav Krishnan (ArK) is 15 years old, and that really shouldn’t be the selling point of his new single ‘To Take The Fall’. Perspective is sometimes skewed when someone clearly talented beyond their years puts out music, but that whole conversation doesn’t need to be had here. This is a banger of a metal tune that shows great writing, good playing and more than anything else, a loving appreciation of the genre and what it does well. Which, given how heavy this is, is giving the listener fun and mild neck pain. And that it does.

Arav is handling vocals and guitars here, which shows that he’s good at both things. The riffs he writes are chock-full of chug, but who’s complaining? They hit hard, they’re high-tempo and they have a great deal of crunch. He also plays around with the elements of this song by chucking in some blastbeats with more atmospheric guitar approaches. Interestingly, he uses them as a way to break up the song’s flow into compelling bursts and as a base on which he puts his growls. That’s a choice that comes out of confidence and is deceptively easy to completely mess up, but it’s set up rather well here. There’s a quick little solo to show off some technique, a quick little breakdown for some headbanging, and some old-school riffage in between. There is something of an attempt to combine a bunch of things from different subgenres on ‘To Take The Fall’, so it doesn’t have a particularly strong focus, but what does matter is that Arav makes sure his music entertains. And that is not particularly easy to do, whether you’re 15 and a savant or not.