Album Review: We Came As Romans - ‘All Is Beautiful… Because We're Doomed: Circularity’

We Came As Romans are back on familiar ground, and that's the point. Circularity doesn't move on from 2025's All Is Beautiful… Because We're Doomed, it goes back into it, finds the space between the last breath and the first, and lives there for a while. The 23-track collection works like a hall of mirrors at a metalcore festival after the headliners have packed up: you've seen every reflection before, but each one now shows someone else standing next to you. Four new songs and six heavily reworked collaborations, with Make Them Suffer, Currents, After The Burial, HEAVENSGATE, Rory Rodriguez of Dayseeker, Ladrones, Headwreck and Bury Tomorrow, turn a concept album into something closer to a complete orbit. In a streaming world built on disposable singles, a band committing this hard to a record's structure is both brave and slightly stubborn, and I respect it for both.

The original album ended with "Because We're Doomed" and looped back to "All Is Beautiful…". The four new tracks sit right in that seam, opening the record like a waiting room between death and rebirth. "When Everything Is Still" sets the scene. It hits hard immediately and brings an anthemic vibe like going back in time to your first live concert. It reminded me of the old idea that the moment after an ending is the only true silence we ever get, and the band seem to be reaching for it, or at least trying to sit inside it before the noise comes back.

"Dead Silent," featuring Make Them Suffer, follows, and the irony of the title probably won't be lost on anyone who knows either band. Alex Reade’s clean vocals are a perfect counterbalance on this track, adding a kind of Phrygian veneer to the brutality of the lyrics delivered by David Stephens. Make Them Suffer feel like a natural fit for a record about the afterlife, a band that has always been good at making darkness sound vast instead of cramped.

"Born From Nothing" is the thematic heart of the new material and, on paper, the most interesting thing here. It deals with the difference between constantly moving and actually movingforward, which hits uncomfortably close for anyone who has confused being busy with growing. The band call it facing the past before asking for the chance to start again. That's a humbler idea than the usual phoenix-from-the-ashes story heavy music falls back on, and I appreciate the honesty. "I’m always in the way… Let me be born from nothing," the bookends of the chorus, effectively demonstrate how running in place can feel like progress and a roadblock at the same time.

"Speak to Exist" closes the new section and hands us back to the original album. The transition into "All Is Beautiful…". is a pretty seamless handoff. The title alone suggests a kind of self-creation through voice. You're only real once you've said something out loud, which is a neat setup for a back half where the songs come back speaking in other people's voices.

Then the loop closes, and this is where Circularity really earns its name. Each of the six reworked tracks is an original song handed to a collaborator, reshaped, and returned to the band carrying someone else's fingerprints, like a letter that comes back covered in other people's notes in the margins.

Currents and After The Burial tear into "bad luck O," and with two bands this heavy on one track, I'd expect the result to sound less like a remix and more like a demolition. Instead, it turned out as a smoother, rawer tribute worthy of the bittersweet but hopeful message. HEAVENSGATE bring their presence to "red smoke O," dropping this track into the dungeon and dragging it across the floor by a heavy chain. Rory Rodriguez of Dayseekerjoins "one by one O," where his voice could easily turn a heavy track into something achingly melodic.

My pick for the most adventurous moment on the album is "culture wound O." Rerecorded entirely in Spanish with Ladrones and laced with flamenco guitar, it's the clearest sign that this project is about more than tacking on guest verses. What makes it moving is the backstory: Dave Stephens learned Spanish fluently so he could talk with his wife's Colombian family. A song called "culture wound" turning into an act of crossing cultures is the kind of quiet thematic rhyme I love finding in a record. It's like an Uno reverse card played on the title itself. The balance between heavy and classical here is tricky, but is a bold statement about this band’s willingness to take chances and deliver something fresh!

"where did you go? O" came out of the band's friendship with Headwreck after touring together in Australia, and it sounds like the song was simply handed over to a group whose sense of fun had stuck with WCAR. Headwreck's personality come through, and the playful clash of their contribution adds significantly to the song's longing title. There's something lovely about a song asking "where did you go?" being answered by friends who showed up.

Finally, Bury Tomorrow rebuild "b2tm O" with a completely new additional chorus. That's a big swing, effectively rewriting the emotional hook of someone else's song, and it neatly sums up the whole project: songs as living things that can be passed around, rebuilt, and given back. Rather than changing the song's meaning, the new chorus pulls the track into more complexity, like a movie’s director’s cut where the tidy theatrical release suddenly has the viewer/listener’s own interpretation to contend with.

If you already loved All Is Beautiful… Because We're Doomed, Circularity won't feel like a departure, and it isn't trying to be. Nobody would call it a new album in the traditional sense. What it does is finish a thought, completing the life, death and rebirth cycle the original only hinted at, and making the friendships formed around the record part of its tracklist. There's ambition, community, and real thematic follow-through here, and the record rewards listening to it as a whole, but may not hold the same appeal for new or casual listeners. Final verdict: 8.5 out of 10.