YMMV / Whitechapel (Band)

• Broken Base: A fair few.
  • A New Era of Corruption: A cool experiment that they should have pursued further, or a boring, one-dimensional slog?
  • Self-titled: A major stylistic shift that needed to happen because it wasn't going to be the 2000s forever and they needed to modernize their sound in a way that would stick, or the point where they sold out and turned into a t-shirt slogan band?
  • Our Endless War: A further honing of their new style, or a bunch of angsty lines repeated ad nauseam over the same few recycled riffs for 45 minutes?
  • Mark of the Blade: A bold and risky move that paid off, or the album where they gave up every last trace of an original identity to become a Slipknot cover band?
  • The Valley: The modern Whitechapel album that finally gets everything right after a long string of polarizing albums, or a clear sign that they're sick of being Whitechapel and would much rather just turn into Stone Sour or A Perfect Circle, but won't actually admit it?
• Fanon Discontinuity: Depending on who you ask, everything after the self-titled, A New Era of Corruption, or sometimes even The Somatic Defilement is sellout trash.
• First Installment Wins: There is a small but not tiny contingent of fans who consider The Somatic Defilement to be their best work; in any case, it is typically considered to be one of the best deathcore albums of all time.
• Gateway Series: They are, along with Suicide Silence, Thy Art Is Murder, Carnifex, and Oceano, one of the more common gateways to extreme music from the mainstream side, and within a more specific point in time, people who were getting into extreme music in the late 2000s often did so through some combination of This Is Exile, The Cleansing, The Price of Existence, Nocturnal, Genesis, and The Ills of Modern Man.
• Seasonal Rot: Our Endless War. While Mark of the Blade is also widely divisive among the fanbase and has many detractors, many fans will begrudgingly extend it points for at least trying something new, whereas the general consensus on Our Endless War seems to be that it's a lazy, uninspired copy/paste job of the self-titled that gave up every last trace of originality to rip off The Acacia Strain and Slipknot, though it did give birth to multiple setlist staples (the title track, "The Saw Is the Law", and "Let Me Burn").
• Signature Song: "This Is Exile" (in general) and "The Saw Is the Law" or "Brimstone" (for their modern material).