Overall Grade: 3.5/5
Prime Cuts: "After The Storm," "Grave Stomper," "Come And Find Me"
Skillet's After the Storm finds strength in its compact scope. Across six songs, the band channels spiritual struggle into forceful guitars, emphatic choruses, and appeals for divine help. The result is a focused collection with several memorable moments, although familiar lyrical imagery and recurring musical devices keep it from feeling like a substantial creative leap. Skillet knows how to make perseverance sound powerful; the more interesting question is whether these songs give that perseverance a distinctive voice.
"Scream" opens with the urgency its title promises, turning frustration into a demand to be heard. John Cooper's rough-edged delivery suits the song's atmosphere of pressure and unrest, while the heavy arrangement gives its emotional release considerable force. As an introduction, it establishes the EP's stakes efficiently. Yet the escalation toward screaming also introduces a device that becomes less striking as the collection repeatedly returns to it. What initially sounds spontaneous gradually feels like an expected part of the architecture.
"Lift Me Up" offers an accessible chorus and a straightforward expression of dependence, but its language is the collection's least distinctive. Fire, rising, and overcoming are familiar ingredients in Skillet's vocabulary, and their reappearance gives the track an immediately recognizable shape. That familiarity should help the song connect in concert, where a direct refrain can carry considerable weight. On record, however, its emotional intentions are clearer than its individual character. The hook does much of the work that a more particular lyric might have shared.
"Grave Stomper" makes a stronger impression by matching its confrontational sound with imagery of shame, death, and spiritual opposition. Its forceful guitars give the song a physical momentum appropriate to its defiance, while the biblical imagery lends its battle language a clearer foundation. There is still a tendency to compress spiritual conflict into slogans, but here the bluntness serves the song's purpose. It is one of the EP's most convincing examples of Skillet turning an encouraging message into something with bite.
The title track broadens the emotional range by considering what survival feels like after the crisis has passed. "After the Storm" gains interest from that shift: endurance includes bewilderment and gratitude, alongside determination. Its buoyant movement and melodic guitar work bring welcome variation to a collection frequently driven by confrontation. The chorus connects because its hope has a sense of aftermath attached to it. Rather than simply urging listeners to keep fighting, the song leaves room to acknowledge what the fight has cost.
"Heaven Help Us" brings a more prayerful posture to the EP, directing its sense of distress toward God. That change matters because a collection built entirely around declarations of strength would risk flattening its subject. Here, the appeal for help admits the limits of human resolve. Even so, the broad language leaves some of the song's emotional possibilities unexplored. A more concrete account of the trouble behind the prayer could have made its dependence feel more personal and less interchangeable with other anthems of struggle.
"Come and Find Me" closes the collection with its most affecting expression of vulnerability. The desire to recover closeness with God gives the song a relational center, and Jen Ledger's vocals provide a welcome contrast to Cooper's abrasive tone. Their interplay allows the chorus to open emotionally as well as musically. Her contribution also exposes a missed opportunity elsewhere: more of that vocal contrast could have given the preceding tracks greater variety. The closer earns its place among the prime cuts by letting need, rather than sheer force, carry its appeal.
Across the EP, the guitar work supplies weight without burying the hooks, and the concise running time keeps the material moving. The limitations emerge through repetition: similarly expansive choruses, recurring bursts of harsh vocals, and lyrics that sometimes reach for established expressions when sharper details would deepen the songs. Those choices make After the Storm easy to recognize as Skillet, but they also restrict its capacity to surprise.
At 3.5/5, After the Storm is a solid release whose best songs justify the shorter format. "Grave Stomper" delivers conviction, the title track gives resilience an emotional aftermath, and "Come and Find Me" brings the journey to a persuasive close. The EP succeeds most fully when its muscular sound makes room for uncertainty and dependence. Those moments suggest that Skillet's next compelling step may come through greater emotional specificity as much as greater volume.
