The Beast I’m Meant to Be is an album of contrasts and range. It moves from sharp cultural critique to the darkest corners of inner experience, from social commentary to intensely personal grief — all carried on a Metallica-influenced guitar-driven sound that Wolejsza has spent years developing, studying, and making his own. It is a debut that sounds like everything it cost to make it.

⇒ Read our album review here.

The album opens with its most immediate and outward-facing statement. “Stupidity Gone Viral” is a hard-hitting critique of internet and social media culture — a track that names the destructive nature of the online world with the directness and riff-driven force the subject demands. In a media landscape where that destruction has become background noise, the song cuts through it.

The title track, “The Beast I’m Meant to Be,” turns the lens entirely inward. A raw and unflinching examination of depression, lost hope, and the slow erosion of self-worth, it is the album’s emotional core — the song that gives the whole collection its name and its weight. Wolejsza does not soften the subject or wrap it in reassurance. He sits with it, and the result is something that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt themselves losing the fight against their own interior.

“One More Hug” is something different again — and perhaps the album’s most quietly devastating moment. A tribute to his cat Bonnie, it captures the specific, impossible grief of realising in real time that a beloved companion is not coming home. It is a small subject in the grandest sense, and an enormous one in every way that actually matters.

Together, the three anchor tracks demonstrate an emotional range that spans from the communal to the deeply private — and the album’s remaining songs continue that breadth, drawing from both Wolejsza’s personal experiences and his observations of the wider world.

⇒ Read our album review here.

Wolejsza came to songwriting as an adult, looking for a way to express himself — and then looking for the community and feedback that would help him do it well. That search led him to the Baltimore songwriter group led by Diana Hanson-Young, where assignments, peer feedback, and years of dedicated craft development shaped him into the artist who made this album.

It was through that community that the key collaborators for The Beast I’m Meant to Be came together. Brian Feinstein — New York-based, and a presence in Wolejsza’s musical development for years — served as executive producer, providing crucial arrangement guidance and song feedback that helped refine each track into its final form. A fellow group member’s album led Wolejsza to Tim Boate, the Baltimore-based producer who recorded, mixed, and mastered the album while adding additional sonic layers that brought Wolejsza’s original ideas fully to life.

The Metallica influence that has driven Wolejsza’s playing since youth runs through the album’s guitar work — the powerful riffs, the directness, the refusal to be quiet — while the songwriting itself ranges beyond any single genre, following the idea wherever it needs to go.

The opening track, “Stupidity Gone Viral,” immediately throws the listener into the fire. Fueled by razor-sharp riffs and a raw punk-inflected vocal delivery, the song attacks internet and social media culture with unapologetic frustration. There’s a palpable exhaustion beneath the aggression, as though Wolejsza is watching humanity dissolve in real time beneath screens and empty performances. The repeated bitterness behind the idea of “stupidity gone viral” becomes less like a slogan and more like a modern horror story. Musically, the track channels the urgency of old-school thrash while maintaining enough looseness to avoid sounding trapped in imitation.

The title track, “The Beast I’m Meant to Be,” darkens the atmosphere even further. The sinister guitar lead and relentless pacing transform the song into a confrontation with self-worth collapsing under emotional weight. Wolejsza approaches depression without romanticizing it. Instead, the track feels suffocating, almost claustrophobic, as if the “beast” is not some mythical monster but the slow erosion of hope itself. The riffs grind forward with mechanical persistence while the lyrics stare directly into emotional numbness.

Throughout the album, the influence of Metallica remains unmistakable, particularly in the rhythm guitar work and thrash-driven momentum. Yet Wolejsza never disappears beneath those inspirations. Songs like “When A Heart” carry flashes of Ride the Lightning-era intensity while still sounding rooted in his own emotional vocabulary. The guitars slash with familiar metallic precision, but the songwriting remains deeply personal rather than performative.

“The Lion Must Roar” expands the album’s sonic palette even further, blending classic heavy metal grandeur with darker doom-laced textures. Elsewhere, “The Clear Check Blues” delivers one of the album’s strongest riffs: groovy, sharp, and instantly addictive. There’s an old-school confidence to the guitar playing throughout the record that feels increasingly rare in newer rock releases. Wolejsza understands how to let riffs breathe rather than burying them beneath overproduction.

That patience becomes especially effective on “Winding Road,” where dramatic openings slowly evolve into heavier and darker explosions of sound. The lack of rigid structure across the album works in its favor; tracks unfold organically, shifting between tension and release without feeling overly calculated. Even the softer or slower moments retain a certain emotional heaviness lingering beneath the surface.

Perhaps the album’s most devastating moment arrives through “One More Hug,” written about the loss of Wolejsza’s cat Bonnie. In a record filled with loud guitars and cultural critique, this track strips everything down to grief in its most intimate form. The heartbreaking realization that she “would not come home with me” lingers quietly across the song, making it one of the album’s most emotionally effective moments precisely because of its restraint.

The Beast I’m Meant to Be doesn’t flatten itself into one emotional register. It can be furious, nostalgic, vulnerable, theatrical, and introspective all within the same record. There are traces of folk rock, classic heavy metal, doom, punk attitude, and thrash ferocity woven throughout the album, yet Wolejsza somehow holds everything together through sheer sincerity. Nothing here feels manufactured for aesthetic purposes alone.

Through The Beast I’m Meant to Be, Matt Wolejsza proves himself less interested in perfection than in emotional honesty. These songs are built from accumulated years of writing, self-exploration, and persistence, and that weight can be heard in every distorted riff and every exhausted lyric. The Beast I’m Meant to Be ultimately stands as an album where heavy riffs are not just aesthetic choices, but emotional survival mechanisms against a heavier world..