Growing the Beard: Waking into Nightmares took them from being a promising but unpolished young group that clearly had talent, but also had a lot of rough edges and had also yet to develop an identity, to being a more fully-realized death/thrash band with far stronger arrangements, much tighter performances, and a codified identity. John Kevill would also probably call IV: Empires Collapse this on some level, as it was the album that really forced them to get creative and completely shake up their songwriting. As far as he is concerned, they would have never made some of the more experimental and progressive tracks on the following two albums without that album as practice.
Vindicated by History: In comparison to most of their old MySpace thrash peers, they are this. While they had a dependable fanbase by Waking into Nightmares, they were still commonly decried as a bandwagon act or "pizza thrash", which continued well into the Worlds Torn Asunder days (where a review on MetalSucks that once again called them a bandwagon act ultimately led to the drastic change in style on IV: Empires Collapse as something of a "fuck you" to anyone who would continue to call them that). By the time their early 2016 comeback tour happened, however, popular opinion of them had shifted and they were commonly viewed as one of the few truly great acts from that era that survived the test of time and were able to survive the cull because they were forward-thinking enough to mix in elements of other genres and think outside the box. Even War Without End was later held to be a surprisingly strong debut that, despite its obvious rough edges and sometimes amateurish feel, was nonetheless the work of a band that had a pretty good idea of what they were doing and had a vision that most of their peers did not.
