Alternative Press gave Senses Fail‘s Renacer 4 out of 5. The score comes from a short notice the band’s label posted on 28 February 2013, a month before the album came out, and that notice is the page an encyclopedia footnote still cites for the rating. This article restores the source trail at that address.
This page carries the score, the date, and selected coverage from that album cycle, including a studio diary and a later feature. Staple News is independent, with no connection to the Staple Records label that used this domain and none to Senses Fail; how the site came to sit here is set out in About Staple News. No review text is reproduced anywhere below.
What the cited notice said
The archived copy is one paragraph. It is dated 28 February 2013, it says the album was reviewed in the new issue “garnering a 4 out of 5 star rating”, it lifts two lines out of the review, and it posts a photograph of the printed page. It names no writer.
The scan is the only pointer to which issue was involved. The label filed the image under a name containing APApril13, which points at the April 2013 issue, but a file name is not a masthead and the notice itself says only that the issue was new.
The same post ran at two addresses on the label’s WordPress install, a dated one and a clean one. Wikipedia cites the clean one, which is the path this article recreates.
A byline the cited page does not carry
Wikipedia’s reception paragraph credits the Alternative Press review to Edward Strickson. The page it cites for that sentence is the label notice above, which names no reviewer at all. Two rows below in the same ratings box, Edward Strickson is credited as the author of a different outlet’s review of the same album, on Alter the Press!, scored 5 out of 5.
That is a mismatch between a sentence and the source under it, and it is worth stating plainly because a reader who follows the footnote to check the byline will find nothing to check it against. Whether the Alternative Press review had a byline in print is not something any source here establishes.
The magazine ran more than a review
Three months before the score, Alternative Press handed a column to the band. Its own page for the first instalment sets it up: “guitarist Zack Roach will check in here with posts to let you, AP web readers, know what’s going on in the studio”. That entry covers 17 November 2012, and the series ran to at least a sixth instalment.
Six months after the review, the magazine ran a feature built around Buddy Nielsen cooking, which the label flagged on 29 August 2013. So one magazine covered one record three ways inside a year: a band member writing the studio diary, a rated review, and a personality feature. A ratings box records one of those three.
The label’s own posts sketch the rest of the cycle. A PureVolume fan question video on 21 February, the review on 28 February, an AbsolutePunk ranking that placed the album tenth on a most anticipated list on 5 March, the kitchen feature in August, and an hour long AbsolutePunk podcast with Nielsen on 11 October.
Which of those pages still resolve
Not many, and not the ones you would expect. The AbsolutePunk thread that carried the ranking now redirects in one hop to the front page of chorus.fm, the site that succeeded it, rather than to the thread. Alternative Press pages refuse automated requests outright, which is bot protection rather than proof of anything, so nothing here claims they are gone. The 2013 Alter the Press! review, is still sitting at its original address and loads without complaint.
The label posts cited here can be read through Internet Archive captures. Every staplerecords.com link above is an archive link, and this domain now belongs to a magazine with no connection to the label that wrote them.
What gets passed around now
In a bounded community sample, interviews were prominent. Across the 100 most recent posts in r/SensesFail, read on 6 September 2026, the two press posts with the most engagement are both long form video interviews, one described by the poster as a 1.5 hour sit down interview, the other titled simply as the longest interview that poster had seen. No magazine score appears in the window at all.
The album that got the 4 out of 5 has kept moving too. In an April 2026 ranking thread one listener placed Renacer fifth of nine and added that two years earlier it would have been near the bottom. That is one person’s list. It is a useful reminder that a number printed in 2013 was a snapshot of that month, which is exactly how the score above should be read.
Reading the score alongside the studio diary
The studio diary offers a different kind of evidence from the score. The first instalment introduces Roach as the writer while the band records; the sixth describes the work moving from rhythm guitars toward lead guitars and Nielsen’s vocals. Those are accounts of a record in progress. The label’s February notice reports a verdict on the finished album, without giving enough text to reconstruct the critic’s reasoning. Read together, they preserve both a production account and a dated reception note. The 4 out of 5 remains the score the label reported; it has not been checked against the printed issue. Our editorial standards cover how to send a correction.