YMMV / The Acacia Strain

• Broken Base: Multiple:
  • Continent: The album that truly established and defined their career and one of the best metalcore albums ever made, or a weak, watered-down album that tried too hard to cater to mainstream audiences?
  • Wormwood: A somewhat risky but necessary evolution that dared to not be a rehash of Continent and one of their best albums, or a blatant attempt to pander to deathcore fans to the detriment of their music and the point where they truly jumped the shark?
  • Coma Witch: A great comeback after the widely-disliked Death Is the Only Mortal and proof that getting new blood was the best thing that ever happened to them, or the band turning into a cover band and making it painfully apparent that their best days are long behind them?
• Growing the Beard: The Dead Walk is widely held to be the point where they truly came into their own.
• Nightmare Fuel: Plenty to go around:
  • "The Impaler". Despite the pretty funny video and having an awesome riff, the Serial Killery and misanthropic lyrics make the song horrifying.
  • It Comes in Waves, full stop. Between the lyrics talking about how gods exist as sadistic extradimensional beings who derive enjoyment from watching us humans kill each other in their name and the disorienting, dissonant sound the band adopts on that album, it's basically the band's take on a Cosmic Horror Story.
  • "pillar of salt". The intro sounds pleasant enough, but the rest of the song is nothing short of harrowing with the lumbering, crushing riffs and apocalyptic lyrics. Not helping is Dylan Walker's absolutely unhinged shrieking and iris.EXE's haunting cleans.
• Seasonal Rot: While they have had divisive albums in the past, Death Is the Only Mortal is widely held to be their worst and is generally seen as a boring, one-dimensional retread of Wormwood with a bunch of songs that all sound the same and a shitty production. Most fans like at least one or two songs off of the album, but it is very rare to find a fan who truly likes the album as a whole, and the band barely plays anything off of the album at this point.
• Signature Song: "Whoa! Shut it Down!" and/or "Beast". Both are by far their most recognizable songs and have been played consistently since their release, though which one people cite tends to depend on when they came on board; older fans will almost certainly cite "Whoa! Shut it Down!", while fans who came on board with Continent or Wormwood are far more likely to cite "Beast".
• Win Back the Crowd: While it was explicitly not intended to be a permanent change in style, It Comes in Waves was almost universally greeted with acclaim by the fanbase and was held to be the best since at least Wormwood, and pulled back in a lot of the people who were lost by the two Shidaker-era albums or Death Is the Only Mortal. Slow Decay continued this, as it was almost universally seen as their best album since at least Wormwood, if not Continent, and was praised for its significantly more atmospheric sound.