Review: Relent – Suffer EP
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” (James 1:2-3, New International Version)
This isn’t a comfortable verse. It doesn’t wrap up nicely or pretend the pain isn’t real.
Neither does Relent’s new EP Suffer. In just five tracks, it dives straight into that same raw, unresolved ache with a ferocity that feels far more spiritually honest than most of what is heard on Sunday morning.
The San Antonio, Texas-based Christian nu-metal band, founded in 2016 by vocalist Miggy Angel Sanchez — also known for his work with the mainstream Latin metal outfit Ill Niño — has never been a band that softens its edges for easy consumption. Since their 2019 debut EP Heart Attack and through their breakout 2021 full-length Heavy (which debuted with nearly 50,000 streams in its first week and saw “Ghost” reach the top five on CMW’s Christian Rock chart), Relent has occupied a distinctive and largely uncrowded lane: nu-metal and hard rock built from the same structural DNA as Korn, P.O.D., and Linkin Park, but rooted in theological seriousness. Their 2023 EP World War Me, released via Rockfest Records and Capitol Distribution, leaned into this territory further, addressing mental health, power, abuse, and spiritual warfare with the directness of a man who has lived through what he’s singing about.
Suffer, released May 6, 2026, as the band’s first independent release in years, is both a continuation and a consolidation of everything Relent has been building.
Relent’s blend of hard rock and nu-metal creates a unique sound that carries the emotional weight of their lyrics. Sanchez brings to Suffer the same approach that earned the band comparisons to P.O.D., Sevendust, Linkin Park, and Breaking Benjamin — but the ambition here is more focused and the production, for an independent release, is strikingly good.
The EP opens with “Remember Me,” a mid-tempo groove-driven track that establishes the record’s central emotional posture: the cry of someone who has slipped into darkness and is asking, with urgency and honesty, to be held. The guitar work here is locked into a down-tuned riff that breathes rather than batters, while Sanchez’s vocals move fluidly between sung melody and a clipped, rhythmic delivery that recalls the best moments of early 2000’s rock.
“Holy Forever,” the lead single, represents the EP’s sonic and theological apex. Previewed by Solid Rock Radio ahead of release as “a hard-hitting, raw, emotionally charged song…that talks about the personal struggle with anxiety and wanting healing and the need for intervention, transformation and restoration,” the track is built around a lyric that functions almost as a compressed psalm: “Holy forever, hold me together.” A key inspiration, Sanchez has said, came from Psalm 94:18-19: “If I say, ‘My foot slips,’ Your mercy, O Lord, will hold me up. In the multitude of my anxieties within me, Your comforts delight my soul.”
The title track, “SUFFER,” is the EP’s most compositionally dense song. Sanchez described the theological architecture behind the broader EP concept plainly in an August 2025 interview with Heaven’s Metal Magazine: “I began to find comfort and understanding in the fact that having faith and still dealing with suffering is a reality. Sometimes the two can’t be separated, and that’s okay. As a believer, suffering is foundational for my growth, whether it’s spiritual, physical, mental, or emotional. At the end of the day, it’s chiseling at my character, and through perseverance, I become stronger.” In musical terms, the track earns that weight. The arrangement shifts through several different intensity levels without ever losing its grip, and that bridge — a brief, near-silent moment before the final freight-train chorus slams back in — is the kind of daring choice that separates a technically solid band from one that actually understands emotion. Relent is the latter.
“Warfare” is the EP’s most aggressive track, a combat-postured offering that addresses spiritual battle in terms that would be familiar to readers of Ephesians 6 but are rendered in tones more likely to appear at a Slipknot festival than a Wednesday night prayer meeting. Musically, the syncopated rhythmic pattern that underpins the verse, a signature of the genre’s groove metal inheritance traced through Texas bands like Pantera and directly into Relent’s San Antonio DNA, is one of the most compelling passages on the record.
The EP closes with “Santo Por Siempre (Holy Forever),” a Spanish-language rendition of the lead single that is both a shrewd cultural acknowledgment of Relent’s Latin identity and a theologically meaningful choice. Sanchez, through his work with Ill Niño, has always operated at the intersection of mainstream metal and Latin culture. The performance is, if anything, more emotionally direct than the English version; the Spanish language’s natural expressiveness makes the lyric’s vulnerability more audible, not less.
The EP does not sound like a band warming back up. It sounds like a band that has been waiting to say something specific and has finally found the right room and the right words.
Relent’s new EP Suffer is available on all major streaming platforms. Check out Relent on Facebook and Instagram or see them live on tour near a city near you.
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