Is this the final album I’m ever going to listen to? That has been on my mind a lot this year. Eventually, whether it be tomorrow or years from now, there will be a final album. It’s in the fine print of the corporeal contract: everything you love will have a last. Final sunset, final kiss, final time hearing “I miss you” from someone who means it. Also: final parallel parking failure, final itch of a Benadryl-defying mosquito bite, final time hearing “take a seat” at a busy pharmacy. No matter how grand or quotidian the event, you will hit your quota.
“Hell of a revelation, Seth!” Yeah, I mean, I’m sure there are ancient cave drawings covering that concept in detail, and even the Armond White of Neanderthals was like, “This? This is too on the nose. And boy, Saber-Toothed Toy Story sure does suck, too.” It’s not meant to be maudlin, either. You didn’t sign up for a memento mori in the form of an introduction to a stupid heavy metal list that contains, let me count here, at least 12 sicko albums that would extend my stay at a grippy-sock vacation spot if they were disclosed during intake.
And yet…is this the final album I’m ever going to listen to? I can’t stop thinking about it. It is the phantom buzz in my pocket when I don’t have my phone. It is the faint car alarm I hear in the distance. It’s the smell of smoke on my clothes after the bar. Whenever I play a record, it rings in my head like an imperceptible overtone. Is this the one?
2025 was a weird one. I felt like I was ping-ponging between extremes. My nook of the world started the year on fire and ended the year drenched in record rainfall — I hope you’re happy, James Taylor. The obituaries in between were brutal: Ozzy, Tompa, and Ace Frehley. David Lynch, D’Angelo, and Eddie Palmieri. Flaco Jiménez, Tom Lehrer, and Brian Wilson. Sly Stone, Roy Ayers, and David Johansen. Roberta Flack, Gwen McCrae, and Marianne Faithfull. Jimmy Cliff, Jellybean Johnson, and Jack DeJohnette. Hermeto Pascoal, Clem Burke, and Steve Cropper. It was like whole sections of a record store disappeared as we recalibrated to the fact that those discographies now have an end. In contrast, for some people close to me, this was one of the best years of their lives because their lives were just beginning: starting new jobs, getting engaged, buying homes, having kids. Granted, this is just life as the Fates defined it: beginnings and ends continuously comingling. It’s just that I don’t remember many years when the whiplash was this intense.
Naturally, the thing that will restore order is…another year-end feature. Sigh. This task has really inflamed my final-albumitis. Because, well, why do we do this? Why do we listen to new music? If there will be a final album, why do we trouble ourselves with a time-consuming pursuit that will inevitably yield many more disappointments than triumphs? Surely, we should spend our time with the favorites we’ve already accumulated, right? Right? RIGHT?
My all-time favorite composition is György Ligeti’s “Requiem.” I acknowledge the ridiculousness of that being a favorite for someone who owns Spastic Tumor albums. Although…it kind of makes sense? If you read any of the abstruse garbage I’ve written this year after Last Rites made the fatal error of calling me up to the big leagues, you knew from my first word that I am a full-on fancy pants art dork. But I can’t deny it. “Requiem” is me. And it is me to such an extent that I can’t really put into words what it does to me. I once told a person caught in the web of modern dating’s dreaded talking phase that, while I couldn’t explain why “Requiem”‘s ugliness was so beautiful, I derive a great deal of life force from that contradiction since it reveals something profound about how to engage with the mysteries of existence. Yes, I typed that right into Hinge, the same app where people answer “by asking me out” when provided with the prompt “the best way to ask me out is.” Thus ended the talking phase. I hope they’re well, wherever they are. Things would be easier if I liked worse music.
Despite my love of “Requiem,” I haven’t listened to it in, like, five years. There are some hang-ups and baggage of mine that factor into that. What if something I hold so dear doesn’t do it for me anymore? It sounds stupid, but those are real stakes for someone whose life revolves around music. I mean, when I was a kid, I used to think Big Wreck’s “That Song” was the pinnacle of human achievement. (Life was better when I liked worse music.) I grew past it as soon as I expanded my worldview, like when I heard Big Wreck’s “The Oaf.” But, yeah, there’s an irrational fear that if I no longer love what I loved, I am no longer who I thought I was…and that’s…terrifying to me now? I’m old. My knees hurt. Can’t I just settle on an identity already?
I think the real reason I haven’t listened to “Requiem” in a long time, though, is that my drive for listening to new releases has always been higher. Perhaps it’s the thrill of the hunt in a catering-brained culture that tries so hard to minimize the perceived pain of decision-making. Possibly, it’s a rebellious act of rebuffing unimaginative billionaires pumping money into AI engines of inauthenticity. Maybe it’s one of the final FOMO frontiers available to me, a chronically unworldly person who is still living on NG when everyone else is on NG+. But more than those reasons, I think there’s something intensely gratifying about being a citizen of the present.
Now, I don’t want to knock those who make a home in the history pages. That’s equally valid, and it’s a life well-spent, one probably well-spent putzing around in the Roman Empire. And like I can talk: I own a big, honking ultrasonic cleaner that vibrates the grime off the used vinyl I spend too much money on. I also concede that living in the now is often, and this is a graduate-level philosophical term, incredibly dumb. As Sam Miller said, we’re all bitterly arguing over the merits of works that future generations will regard as C-pluses.
All the same, here I am, still picking through the new album announcements in my inbox as I write this recap. I think the reason I’m compelled to do this runs deeper than the fact that I’m afflicted by whatever disease it is that makes you believe you own a lot of records except the ones you want. But unfortunately, like my affinity for “Requiem,” the explanation is not something I can easily put into words.
This is a trite thing to write, but we have to start somewhere: Do you also find that the spark of listening to new music is different from hearing old music for the first time? Am I insane? To me, something is undeniably exciting about music that wasn’t here yesterday and is now here today. Old music, no matter how it may shake your being and reform your soul, is eternal, yes, but also already experienced. New music is fresh. It’s a flower that hasn’t been plucked and pressed into a book by critical curators. Listening to it is like stepping onto freshly cooled magma and leaving the first footprints.
In addition, unlike some older music that requires a backstory to fully understand, new music doesn’t need the same plaque-in-a-museum history lesson to grasp some of its context. You’re living part of that context, bud. You are the metadata, my dude. Quite literally, this is your life, and by living it alongside the artists who make this music, you can connect with them over, at the very least, persisting on this planet at the same time.
Connection. There’s a paragraph in “Tales From an Attic,” a Sierra Bellows essay for the American Scholar, that has been bookmarked in my brain since it was published last year.
Someone told me once that sharing your life with a partner is consolation for only being allowed to live one life. That when you know someone else intimately, when you participate in the daily joy and sadness that person feels, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life. It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.
New music, to me, is one of those forms.
We lost our friend Warren Binder this year. I miss him. I wish I could tell him that. Listening to new music and subsequently collecting it were topics we frequently discussed. For example, instead of buying a shelf-bowing amount of records, we should probably limit ourselves to our top 10 every year. And then we’d laugh, because who were we kidding?
We also delved into the idea that music made up such a large part of our essence, the basis of our personhood, that some people would never truly understand us unless they listened to the music we loved. I distinctly remember us working through that idea at a Throw Rag show, a band whose biggest song on Spotify is titled “Space Hump Me.” Somber environment. My joke was that some well-meaning hospice nurse would learn that I like metal and usher me off this mortal coil with, like, Metallica’s Reload played through a broken Samsung Galaxy speaker. Me? Trying to avoid exploring feelings with a punchline? But there’s something so much more intimate and resonant in the way we, and most notably Warren, choose to use music to interact with those around us.
If the music I love is one sliver of the pie chart that defines me, listening to more of it helps me to better understand myself. In turn, listening to more music helps me to better relate to others. This act of understanding through music consumption won’t allow me to know the whole of a person — it won’t map the entirety of their interiority because I don’t think that’s possible — but it will let me know a piece of them. No matter how tiny that piece may be, it will allow me to connect with them, which is one strand in a growing network of connections: me, them, the artists making the music. We’re all bound together by this miracle of sound, this form of consolation that happens many times over.
I’d like to think that when we make music recommendations — real, selfless ones, not, “Hey, check out my demo” — we’re presenting a potential new connection. We’re saying, “Hey, this is a piece of me, maybe it’s a piece of you, too.” It’s an exchange not just of music but of lives — memories, desires, who we are, who we want to be. And if a connection is made, it will last. I’ll always think of Warren whenever I hear Throw Rag. He’ll just be…there. And, if that’s the case, must we have a final album? Because if we make enough connections, one of the albums we love — a piece of ourselves and, really, a recording of our lives — will be forever spinning within someone else.
THE GOOD STUFF
20. Glorious Depravity – Death Never Sleeps
It locked horns for weeks with Chaos Inception, but Glorious Depravity prevailed as the superlative straight-up spud of the year.
If you could bet on metal, certain shadily controlled syndicates would probably offer lines indicating it’d be tough for Glorious Depravity to best 2020’s Ageless Violence, both in terms of riffs (“Ocean of Scabs”) and song titles (“Incel Christ”). (Please don’t give Kalshi or DraftKings any ideas; although, I would be amused if Emmanuel Clase got good at guitar in order to tank upcoming albums.) But, hot damn, Death Never Sleeps edges out its predecessor. It does so early, too. Riffs: “Slaughter the Gerontocrats.” Song titles: “Slaughter the Gerontocrats.” The quintet achieves this level up by taking a page out of bands like Garoted’s playbook: go hard as hell, find the red line, and push far past it. Most of these songs from the all-star New York, New York, crew are in the methed-out Deicide mold, like if Legion blasted glass with a blow torch and GTA’d a Dodge Demon. But the delectable center of this amphetamine-laced Tootsie Pop is the beatdown riffs that imbue Death Never Sleeps with a Strong Island sort of ignorant toughness.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
19. Effluence – Pianistic Dismemberment
A late-in-the-year three-way split with Tantric Bile and Steve Matthews Trio proved this LP wouldn’t be Effluence’s swansong, but there’s an air of finality to Pianistic Dismemberment, mainly because where else can the blast-it-all-to-bits band go from here? [Effluence will, in fact, go somewhere since a new album was announced and given a January 2026 release date.]
As the name implies, Pianistic Dismemberment trades in the guitar for a piano, and the result is as if Billy Joel, circa Attila, had a bad salvia trip in which he and Franz Liszt were jumped into Disgorge by Albert Ayler. “NO GUITARS ON THIS ALBUM…’ CAUSE PIANO ATE EM :[,” solo member Matt writes in the Bandcamp liner notes. Piano as a sarlacc pit. Sure, why not?
However, for all the miasmic music Effluence has glooped out over the years, be it the Encenathrakh attacks or free jazz ambushes, Pianistic Dismemberment is one of the most conventionally death metal albums in its oeuvre. Play the first half of this album on guitar, and we’d have the pleasure of ordering your record from the Brutal Mind distro without a jewel case. That is to say, despite the last half descending into something more in the wheelhouse of a Cecil Taylor obsessive, Pianistic Dismemberment is as “normal” as Effluence can get…although, to be clear, it’s a brutal death metal album played on piano.
Sarmat will always be Effluence’s shining statement, its artistic masterpiece, but Pianistic Dismemberment is why the band will always be remembered.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
18. Siege Column – Sulphur Omega
Sometimes you just want to be evil. Siege Column has always sounded like a Deicide scion raised by a pack of ratty Celtic Frost records that learned to communicate through primitive Bolt Thrower riffs. There are gruff vocals, panic solos, battering-ram drums, and feral chugs that make you want to walk around like The Bushwhackers — a true metal of death operation, and something that will naturally repel grave-robbing, new-school OSDM wimps.
Sulphur Omega is the same Siege Column formula through and through, but it spikes that cocktail with an irresponsible number of injections of tren. The vocals rumble like a lowered portcullis. The solos wail like terrified horses. The drums thump like something that will light up your Nextdoor app with “gunshots????” queries. The chugs grind like The Wheel of Pain. Sulphur Omega will surely be charged as an accessory once you inevitably punch someone while listening to it. Not your fault; you just wanted to be evil. You can tell the judge that it’s the best death metal album with Joe Aversario’s name on it since Massive Retaliation’s Arms of the War God. Oh, and then drop the Nihil Verum Nisi Mors credo: “THIS IS THE NEW JERSEY METAL ATTACK! BORN IN EIGHTIES, DIE IN EIGHTIES!”
• Bandcamp
17. Christian Necromancy – The Pederast
A warning for our American readership: Since there’s an executive order on the books titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” friend, you are going on a list if you listen to this album. Your only hope is that, considering y’all now live under a pedoconocracy, maybe this album will get a pass. Because the tldr for Christian Necromancy’s debut is: Jesus H. Christ liked kids…a lot.
The anonymous members of Christian Necromancy aren’t just cosplaying as heavy metal Chris Hansens, either. They claim to have receipts: “This is not a work of fiction. Everything lyrically stated in these songs is based on historical fact, with only slight artistic embellishments,” argues a line in the Bandcamp notes. Finally, a black metal band tackling pederasty that isn’t Inquisition.
Anyway, similar to the recent axe-shunning exploits of its labelmates in Effluence, Christian Necromancy has forgone the electric guitar for a 10-string lyre. (Is anyone going to show up to NAMM next year? Is Sweetwater going to have to plunder a ren faire?) The result is as if Jute Gyte made its Goatlord, a rollickingly lofi affair that makes up for its sonic austerity with sheer nastiness. There are some real-deal riffs on this thing, but the big-picture appeal is just being battered by strident tones and assaultive blasts for 34 minutes. FFO Mastery, extremity, running from theocratic authorities.
• Bandcamp
16. Vörnir – Av Hädanfärd Krönt
In another time, Vörnir’s debut, Av Hädanfärd Krönt, would’ve been released by Fallen Empire on a limited pressing of, like, 13 records, leading me to scour Discogs for the next 10 years to obtain a copy. Instead, Vörnir’s debut, Av Hädanfärd Krönt, is released by Amor Fati Productions, and since shipping is $30, I’ll be scouring Discogs for the next 10 years to obtain a copy. See the difference?
Vörnir is an international supergroup for people who get down with a particular kind of grandiose avant-garde black metal. Hark, from whence cometh this discordant squall? It’s A. Woldaeg from Chaos Moon, H.V. Lyngdal from Wormlust, R from Ash Borer, and Swartadauþuz from a bunch of bands I’ll never have a hope of pronouncing. A session drummer named K.P, who has no other credits, which makes this album their rookie card, is there for good measure.
You don’t have to be familiar with that starting five to enjoy Vörnir. Like Leviathan’s better moments, Av Hädanfärd Krönt finds the right balance between the musically interesting and the mystical. Obviously, everyone involved can play — K.P, in particular, kicks their kit’s ass with a power that would pound Drumeo into dust.
That said, it doesn’t sound like Vörnir’s skills have pacified its ambition. You get some wildly inventive passages of absolute ensorcellment, the kind of stuff only a curious mind unsullied by a peek behind the curtain could churn out. Check out the way the sheets of cold guitar shimmer with a spine-shivering maelvolence, like watching the aurora borealis as you freeze to death. As your vision blurs, it’s almost like you can hear the faint wailing of a creature from beyond the veil, which is your next destination.
• Bandcamp
15. Hateful Abandon – Threat
“These have been our hardest years,” Tom Price and Martin Brindley, the two brains behind the UK’s Hateful Abandon, wrote in the Bandcamp notes for Threat, the duo’s first release in 11 years. Yeah, definitely concur, my guys. But Price and Brindley have some closer-to-home reasons for why that decade-plus sucked ass besides [waves hands at the world] everything.
“Tracks 4-8 rescued from the rubble. Extracted from a destroyed hard drive,” goes the spirit-crushing summation. Oof. I had to be kept away from sharp objects after a CMS crashed, wiping out an hour of music-writing dreck, so I can’t imagine what it felt like to have whole-ass songs imprisoned within inaccessible sectors.
However, by the grace of Saint Steve Gibson, those songs have been released from the ones and zeros purgatory. And the songs are great. The initial comparison is something like a more post-punky industrial band, like if Godflesh got an assist from early Killing Joke.
And then other elements start to surface. There’s a pre-A Sun That Never Sets Neurosisness to how these songs are constructed, this almost-tribal layering of rhythms, not to mention the way the legato synths seem to hang in the air like a Paulstretched string quartet. And every moment is shot through with a black metal bleakness, perhaps owing to Price and Brindley’s previous stops on the heavy metal carousel.
Threat produces an engaging effect on the listener, then. It’s hypnotic, yes, but it doesn’t wash over you. It isn’t anesthetizing. Instead, it wraps you up in a blanket of blackness, and you feel every PSI as it starts to squeeze.
• Bandcamp
14. Kostnatění – Přílišnost
I’ll call my shot: In 10 years, people will love this album once they figure out what to do with it.
Following 2023’s stunning Úpal, Kostnatění mastermind D.L. pulls the e-brake for Přílišnost (Excess), an album that drifts around a tight corner and zooms off into a new direction. Yes, vestiges of the prior US three-piece remain. There’s that adventurous shredding that’s like !.T.O.O.H.! or Lykathea Aflame collected many music culture stamps in their passports, diversifying their timbres and tonality. There’s also that irrepressible instinct to create something new, providing listeners with the same sense of wonder they felt when they first heard metal.
Again, Přílišnost reprises those core traits; it’s just that Kostnatění constantly shifts the context, hot swapping in new influences. Opener “Dokonalé křišťálové město (Perfect Crystal City)” is like Malokarpatan covering Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy,” an industrial machine-scream shot through with bruising breakbeats. …lol, I’m sorry, what? And yet, as the prior comparisons indicate, a certain blackened trueness also emanates from that song. That’s part of the fun of listening: hearing what fusions Kostnatění can cook up. There are a whole lot of spices swimming around in this stew, different flavor profiles mixing to create unexpected combinations, and it would be cruel to deny you the thrill by listing the ingredients.
But that’s not why Přílišnost will hold up until its inevitable reappraisal. I’ll explain its longevity like this: There’s a trend on social media I’ve grown to hate, that of people taking well-known songs and using AI to flip them into different genres. “Interstate Love Song” as a Stax single, that sort of nonsense. These exercises are all artless slop because they lack human ingenuity. When living music lovers come together to work out how to make their sometimes unconnected influences into whole-ass songs that sound good, it’s like opening up a wormhole of pure potential — who knows where it will lead? AI won’t allow itself to surprise, especially when we consider who is programming its taste. It will go only as far as the median of its corpus. The human creative process, though, is inherently unstable in a good way. Therein lies the magic. On one side, you have a predictive engine using its sycophantic training to aim for mediocre acceptance. On the other, you have the unpredictability of humans using their idiosyncratic influences to make something interesting. Přílišnost will last because it’s so clearly the work of weirdos with uncontainable imaginations who are trying to tame their ambitions, abilities, and aesthetics in the same way a crew of cowhands might wrangle a herd of stampeding cattle. The creation is as random as a game of Go. The result is singular. Hit me up in a decade and tell me I’m wrong.
• Bandcamp
13. Scimitar – Scimitarium I
First and foremost, Scimitar’s debut full-length, Scimitarium I, is fun in a way that should appeal to the modern tradster who wants to dig deeper than NWOTHM. The Denmark quintet is very Slough Feg-y. Trad leads scintillate like the sparks flying off steel during a sword fight, trad riffs gallop with the responsive readiness of a seasoned war horse. It feels very true; no one would ask it to leave the hall.
Ah, but everything is a bit more…frenzied, isn’t it? It’s as if Scimitar’s eyes keep rolling back into its head, and it’s possessed by something darker, stranger, more mischievous. It’s Slough Feg-y indeed, but a Slough Feg that has had its mind infiltrated by, like, Dispirit. Or maybe it’s a version of Hammers of Misfortune entranced by occult magick. Scimitarium I is hypnotized heavy metal that has heard the snap of the stick.
Right, there’s a wild-eyed witchiness at Scimitarium I‘s core, a cauldron-bubble sense of supernatural madness, a Bacchian descent into feverish revelry. This deliriousness adds a devilish dimension to Scimitar’s songwriting. The guitars spit out circular leads that twirl like Sufi whirling, the bass and drums boil with the urgency of a pot of water left unattended on a roaring stove, the layered vocals convene with the disorienting surrealness of disembodied voices squatting in your head.
Crucially, though, Scimitar’s unhinged inclinations don’t obscure its knack for epic-tale-weaving aural storytelling. Like any good trad-at-heart metaller, these songs go somewhere. They have a destination. They take the journey. Of course, as with any ardent partier, they may take the long way home. Then again, who hasn’t gone for a wander after the pub? Don’t deny yourself the fun.
• Bandcamp
12. Trauma Bond – Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone
In my dotage, I’ve mellowed. I drive in the slow lane. I walk away instead of starting fights with rude people. I keep my cool when besieged by life’s many irritations.
Even so, one day at work, I couldn’t get a pesky Excel formula to work, so, reflexively, I lifted my keyboard above my head and smashed it on my desk. Keyboard shrapnel flew everywhere as if I triggered a high-yield bomb hidden within the ESC key. I knew I was making a bad decision as soon as I picked the keyboard up, but I couldn’t stop myself. It had to die. It had to be sacrificed. There I was, a 40-something professional surrounded by de-QWERTY-ifed aftermath of plastic bits. And the whole act felt…amazing. Energizing. Freeing. Later, with adrenaline still coursing through my veins, the custodian emptied my trash can and asked, “Are you OK?” Nope!
I get the feeling that the UK’s Trauma Bond is the same kind of nope, or, at the very least, these grindy, metalcore-y riffs are similarly energizing, freeing, and amazing. The duo has always shown up to the riff market with a basket of ripe ones, the kinds of crushing chugs and grooves that could make even the most pious nun want to crowdkill her convent. The duo always rips it up like the rent is due.
Those riffs are still present, but Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone, Trauma Bond’s third album-ish, contains a much more varied yet cohesive narrative that dips its toe deeper into other styles. For one, a mechanized whirr is much more pronounced, a noisy nastiness that almost borders on death industrial. (If the duo ever wants to cut a power electronics tweener before starting work on the next album, I am down.) And there’s a greater emphasis on dynamics, a rise and fall, and fast and slow, that helps carry Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone along with the ease of an intricately plotted movie. I mean, the nine-minute closer, “Dissonance,” probably qualifies as the best post-metal song I’ve heard in ages, a truly cathartic crescendo that pays off all the fast stuff.
Nevertheless, you’re here for the release. When I listen to Summer Ends. Some Are Long Gone, I look and feel like I’ve inhaled an entire bottle of ammonia. Put Trauma Bond on, find your metaphorical keyboard, and destroy it. Or, hell, destroy an actual keyboard. Just make sure you peel the tracking label off the back so IT can’t pin it on you. There’s absolutely no reason why I would know that information.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
11. Deliquesce – Saviour / Enslaver
I didn’t get Saviour / Enslaver for a long time. It took many touch-and-goes for Deliquesce’s follow-up to the great Cursed With Malevolence to land. The reason for that, I think, is that Saviour / Enslaver is…a lot. It’s a lot. It’s very, very, very a lot.
The Australians take what worked on Cursed With Malevolence — the Suffocation-by-way-of-Disincarnate riffs, the constant churn of new sections, and the general toughguyiness that didn’t make that album stand out like a sore thumb on a label more known for hardcore bands — and multiply all of it by a high degree of difficulty. Accordingly, it sounds like the four-piece is throwing so much at you because, well, it is.
If Cursed With Malevolence was like running through an especially punishing American Gladiators gauntlet, Saviour / Enslaver is like getting turned into red mist by soldier of fortune dudes named Destroyer and Destructor operating tennis-ball-spewing heavy machine guns. On top of that, all of these songs are played with masterful precision, a 10,000-hour feel for the style. It’s kind of like watching, say, GinoMachino play Elden Ring, and being like, “Huh, did we even play the same game?” It makes sense that Deliquesce offers an official guitar and bass tab book on its Bandcamp. Death metal guitar nerds are going to pore over this album like it’s a map to El Dorado.
However, Saviour / Enslaver isn’t hobbled by the kind of clinicism that has ruined tech death, that sort of unctuous shredding aimed solely at other guitar influencers. Nerp, it has a pleasing warmth to it. You can sense these guys weren’t only sweating this stuff out but also enjoying every ounce of bodily fluid they lost. After all, this is such a wonderfully grimy ode to the kind of death metal that festered in Long Island basements, those subterranean spaces where spawns were bred.
So, if I have any advice, that warmth is the key during your first couple of plays of Saviour / Enslaver. It’ll be what gets you through the initial pelting of a lot. It’s like looking over at a smiling buddy similarly pinned behind a pad, a reassuring presence of gallows-born interconnection, before you learn to run between the tennis balls. Destroyer and Destructor await. It’s time to go over the top.
• Last Rites Review
• Bandcamp
THE GOODER STUFF
10. Hypomanic Daydream – The Yearning
By 2022, Putrescine evolved into something fascinating. The San Diego band’s debut EP, 2019’s The One Reborn, named after a boss from Bloodborne, was solid, a decent spud of straighter death metal. What set it apart from similar Carcassian crews was co-vocalist Marie McAuliffe’s drum programming, which gave the songs a slightly more forward-thinking edge. The One Reborn was a spud, yes, but it had a hint of weirder eyes sprouting from its body.
Fast forward three years, and Putrescine was, uh, reborn, plopping its magnum opus, “In a Growing Sun,” onto a split with Adzes. Suddenly, the band was fusing death metal with far more avant-garde inclinations. The music was deeper, richer, and, well, weirder, paying off the promise of its early askewness. It was as if Thantifaxath messed around with Timeghoul while working on a doctoral thesis concerning experimental classical music.
But the dramatic shift in sound wasn’t off-putting in a way that art music can be. “In a Growing Sun” ferried through a Bermuda Triangle of fringier interests, but wasn’t fart-sniffy, wasn’t impressed by itself. Instead, it had a very human core provided by Marie McAuliffe’s emotionally resonant vocals, an audience stand-in holding open the door for bewildered listeners.
McAuliffe took that out-there energy with her to Hypomanic Daydream. At first, the new solo project sounded like it would follow the trails blazed by bands like OLD, Carbonized, and Disharmonic Orchestra, a uniquely progressive strain of omnicore that recalled an early ’90s sense of adventurism before then-burgeoning styles became more codified. Debut album Image introduced McAuliffe as Manic Dream Girl and introduced new elements, twisting those elements into something like Coroner or Voivod messing around with vocaloids — you know, just your usual death metal album that included a Paramore cover.
Then, like Putrescine, Hypomanic Daydream took the leap. The Yearning, a headspinningly eclectic record of disparate influences, sounds so much like the shape of something to come. And yet, it’s undeniably metal, taking recognizable touchstones and snapping them together into a metal mecha. Often, these tracks are like Eye-era King Diamond jettisoned his band for Atheist, and that new crew was Tron‘d into an early internet mainframe storing JRPG soundtracks.
The Yearning, like its ancestor, is also so very human. It’s no surprise that Big Feelings Metal advocate Brendan Sloan is in the credits for reamping and mastering. Even when a listener is caught up in a whirlwind of guest Quetzal Tirado’s bass clarinet(!) solos, there’s this emotional aspect that aims straight for the heart. The Yearning isn’t an exercise in genre mutation or weaving an RIO spirit into metal’s DNA. It lives, it breathes, it feels. It’s the real deal.
• Bandcamp
9. Sulfuric Cautery – Killing Spree
I am reporting to you live from the back of a DIY punk spot, waiting to see Sulfuric Cautery. Problem: power is out in this city block. The organizers left to rent a generator. I mean, what else is there to do? The grind must go on.
Fittingly, this drive to keep things moving appears to be a key trait of the Los Angeles duo. Sulfuric Cautery is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. It has certainly racked up the miles during that decade. The journey has taken it from Dayton, Ohio, to across the globe, gaining it a following as perhaps the preeminent American purveyor of hyper-blast turbo-ping goregrind. The oft-made comparison is, of course, Last Days of Humanity. Still, Sulfuric Cautery is more like a cross between Foetopsy and a punkier pummeling, in the same sense that orthodox grind derived its ferocity from punk and core.
Naturally, Sulfuric Cautery has — here’s that phrase again — kept it moving, steadily evolving over the years, especially after it relocated to LA and was reconfigured as a two-piece. Over the past couple years in whatever venue is available to play, a more technical, brutal death metal riff style has burbled forth from the pool of spilled guts. Sulfuric Cautery has fattened its blasting passages and increased the Richter-scale-registering shake of its slowdowns. (This has culminated in the straight-up BDM of Consummate Extripation, Sulfuric Cautery’s second LP of 2025, and a record that wasn’t yet released when our rankings went to press. Spoiler: it bangs.) Thus, Killing Spree is the band’s most exacting document, navigating a turn-on-the-dime rally course of gore-soaked sickness.
Even so, this is Sulfuric Cautery, so Killing Spree is very moist, very wet, and very gross, like dipping into a bubbling jacuzzi of rotten offal. That’s the thing: The band keeps it moving, but it retains its voice, its spirit, no matter the stop. It’s…uh…hold on, the lights are back on. Gotta run. We’ll talk more later.
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8. Psudoku – Psudoktrination
Somehow, 14 years have passed since Psudoku plopped out of a wormhole with its aptly titled prog grind manifesto, Space Grind. That one, a bouncy ripper from Norwegian gonzo specialist Cpt. Roger, who is also the grindsmith behind the equally wacky Brutal Blues, Parlamentarisk Sodomi, and BxSxRx, lays out the general Psudoku concept of applying grind tempos to, like, metalized Van der Graaf Generator riffs. Space Grind is a starship powered by spiky salvos of sprightly smartness. It’s also the best piece of music with a Stephen Hawking credit, mainly because Pink Floyd’s “Keep Talking” doesn’t have blast beats.
Subsequent transmissions from a place in deepest, darkest space (again, Norway) developed the prog side of the equation, eventually sling-shotting Psudoku much closer to the Zappa nebula. Pretty brain-spraining all things considered, and, well, great, but the tunes started losing some of the hyperdrive grind that played up the entertaining incongruity.
Psudoktrination returns Cpt. Roger to a tight orbit around the grind planetoid. It is mind-expanding in the same way that someone using the jaws of life to free your brain from your skull is mind-expanding. These circular riffs often sound like an aircraft violently spinning toward its doom. And yet, despite the high-Gs grind maneuvers that put you on the brink of G-LOC, Psudoktrination is still plenty prog. Like, the fact that this album can keep building and building without inducing blast fatigue has to be thanks to some advanced songwriting engineering. Ultimately, if you’re new to this whole thing, Psudoktrination will take a few spins to keep track of the path it’s plotting. But stick with it. There are few things like it in not only metal, but all of music.
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7. Dissona – Receptor
Oh, the number of times I’ve had to hear prog haters bemoan the style’s supposed lack of emotional maturity. You know the old saw: music theory over thoughtfulness, pubescent fantasies over stark reality, nerd-impressing clinical widdles over raw-nerve immediacy. Prog is a series of gilded, fanciful artifices. It’s a phase of pedantry that must be shed. It’s unworldly, superficial nonsense that knows little of matters of the heart.
This, ahem, prog-nostication is, of course, ridiculous. I feel bad for you, son, if you’ve never experienced introspection in Jim Matheos’s guitar or catharsis via John Arch’s vocals. (“Kindred Spirits,” for curious parties.) And, I mean, two of the main lyrical themes on Twisted into Form and Zero Hour’s Encyclopaedia Metallum pages are “feelings” and “emotions” respectively, and those two bands have busted more brains with math-breaking music than many this century.
Well, add Dissona to the list of prog-complaint dispellers. The feelings come quickly on Receptor, the quartet’s long-awaited fourth full-length. “Receptor” begins with a deep breath, a moment of relative quietude. Then the dam breaks, and in rushes a flood of prog ardor. “Weighing down/ On the innermost composure,” David Dubenic sings. And it’s like, OK, yes, this person has lived a life. This person has heard the flatline of ego death. This person’s passion is a pure mood for adults. Feelings!
Here’s the thing: Although undeniably powerful, Dissona doesn’t let the feelings overwhelm the music. It’s one of the band’s many canny balancing acts. Receptor is theatrical without boiling over into theater-kid overexuberance. Receptor is eclectic, utilizing many tones and timbres — including a punchy electronic section that stirred within me an unforetold desire to hear an industrial prog record — without losing cohesion. And Receptor showcases these musicians’ skills without detracting from the grand sweep of the music.
Right, that sweep. What impresses me most about Receptor is its ability to reclaim a sort of dramatic romanticism that found its way into a few releases in the early ’00s: Disillusion’s Back to Times of Splendor, Orphaned Land’s Mabool, Symbyosis’s On the Wings of Phoenix, that kind of thing. It’s a sense of wonder that got slayed by the next two decades of millennial cynicism. Dissona has that same quality, that sort of uninhibited grandness, something that makes it seem larger than just an album. It’s something you just feel. That’s undeniable.
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6. Umulamahri – Learning the Secrets of Acid
We open a portal to the Other Side. We see many things that challenge our understanding of the alternate universe we have stepped foot in: some great, some horrible, some so unlikely we can’t wrap our brains around them. The alternate Apple Music lets you shuffle by album. The alternate government has classed pizza as a Schedule I drug. The alternate Cleveland Guardians are the reigning three-time World Series winners. We check our watches: two more hours before we can return.
We buy concert tickets through Live Nation by Amazon, which costs $15 plus a $1,500 processing fee. God Forbid opens the show — apparently, it crossed over long before us and has continued its run as the support slot for every tour here, too. Then, the lights cut out.
A sub-bass hum shakes the room, causing those of weaker constitution to vomit. The curtains open, and there float three beholders. The trio plays. The din is indescribable. It’s as if Steve Tucker requisitioned Mortician, booted the drum machine for a flesh-and-blood kit destroyer blessed with an internal metronome of an atomic clock, and then forced everyone to down a bunch of DiPT. The music is punishing. No-wave-y synth bass crushes us like we’re a foolish billionaire steering a submarine with a video game controller. The music is disorienting. Rhythms clobber us from every direction like a symphony of Ernie Shavers haymakers synchronized to a Shackleton DJ set. The music is frightening. Guttural roars and throat-searing rasps trigger a lizard brain response of pervasive dread. OK. Wait. Now they’re actually covering Mortician, but it’s unlike the idiots we know. It’s twisted into a strange shape through the means of reverse mental torture.
We stand stunned. The more suggestible souls around us in the throes of mind control slowly shamble around the mosh pit. Other audience members frantically claw at their skin as if trying to release whatever incantation is eating their souls. Some jerk spills their beer on us because this, after all, is still a concert.
We check our watches: two minutes. We quickly walk to the bathroom. Someone standing over the sink offers us a line of pizza to snort. We decline. We pack ourselves into a stall and open the portal. We fall in.
Back on the ice of our Reiden Lake in our universe, we try to regain our bearings. “What even was that?” Suddenly, we feel a presence behind us. It is the beholders. Somehow, the band has come back with us. The beholders shapeshift into musicians we recognize: Baring Teeth’s Andrew Hawkins, Mithridatic’s Kévin Paradis, and one other we know so well. “Oh my, are you meant to be Doug Moore from Pyrrhon, Seputus, Weeping Sores, Scarcity, and Glorious Depravity?” The transformed beholder nods.
The three beholders turn to leave. As they’re walking away, we cry, “Wait, what is the name of this band?” The Hawkins-looking one, obviously the leader, turns around and says in a voice that is somehow clear and completely alien, “Umulamahri.” We look at each other, confused. We cry, “Wait, how do you even spell that?” But the beholders are gone and gone where we know not.
The next morning, we read in the paper that 15 music journalists have been ritualistically beheaded for mistakenly classifying full-lengths as EPs. No one witnessed these likely justified homicides, but tenants in neighboring apartments say they heard a sound through the wall. It was a strange voice whispering a word they had never heard before: “Umulamahhhhhhhriiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.” No one can spell it. No matter, there’s a better lead. Investigators find two pieces of evidence at the first scene: a duct-taped-together interdimensional device with God Forbid’s name scrawled on the handle, and a scrap of paper inscribed with a curious phrase. “Learning the Secrets of Acid?” a detective says. And then the walls start to melt.
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5. Putridity – Morbid Ataraxia
I need music to match the chaos in my brain. Morbid Ataraxia is that chaos.
Now, Putridity’s fourth full-length does have a grand design that reveals itself on multiple listens. It sounds like one of those “the entire [media property] but every time [x] does [y] it gets faster” videos when the speed multiplier is really cooking. And there’s kind of a brutal death metal recognizability to what the Italian rippers are ripping into: think a Suffocation album getting tortured by Brodequin. Plus, you know, this quintet isn’t stupid: I’m sure some expert YouTube reactor could break the songwriting down with scientific rigor and demonstrate how multiplex all of it is. I choose you, The Charismatic Voice.
But the true appeal of this stuff is simply a dizzying array of chugs, blasts, gutturals, and wee-woos spinning around your head like stinging sand in a dust devil. Mayhem, put more simply. It issues a simple instruction, too: You must submit.
It goes without saying, then, that Morbid Ataraxia is prime degenerate mutant music for degenerate mutants. To drive that home, during a rare breather, we’re treated to Divine’s oft-sampled “kill everyone now” stump speech. Despite that sample’s splatter metal ubiquity, it feels…uh…more earned here; there is, after all, a song titled “In Disgust They Shine.” My fellow debauchees, the state of the goo is icky.
Still, what continually draws me to Morbid Ataraxia, and Putridity in general, is not just the goo and not just the chaos, but the way that chaos can overcome your senses. I’m probably the only person on the planet who actually likes this artistic choice, but there’s an extremely brown noise drone connecting these tracks, including a very long, secret-track-esque extended whum. That thing is like a backdoor into my brain, some real Manchurian Candidate stuff, preparing me to thrash around like a real dumbass once the music hits. As soon as the closer, “Immersed in the Spell of Death,” transitions back into music again, I have been psychologically conditioned to fight a bear. I am that chaos. Bring me the bear.
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4. Unbirth – Asomatous Besmirchment
Asomatous Besmirchment ends with a sample of HAL 9000 slowly being drained of digital life. It’s a pretty appropriate way to close out this Italian brutal death metal band’s third full-length. Although, not in the way you might think.
Sure, these songs add up to 37 minutes of indefatigable ass-kicking, showcasing a machine-like ability to keep the rhythmic pistons pumping. And yet, if we visualize the drifting axes of modern BDM as a scatter plot, Asomatous Besmirchment falls into an interesting place.
Unbirth is neither gooey slop nor laser-precise tech. Its riffs neither showcase a slam simplicity nor a streets-ahead sophistication. It’s neither crushingly slow nor blazingly fast. No, it falls into the middle of all these trends.
That might not sound exciting to those craving either extreme. Still, Unbirth is so good at making its material engaging that Asomatous Besmirchment ends up this platonic ideal of a uniquely European type of BDM classicism. The FFO taxonomy is something like good-era Decapitated with a Disavowed engine swap. As you’d expect from that pairing, Unbirth isn’t that concerned with pushing brutal boundaries that will only get redistricted within the lifespan of a frail fruit fly.
That’s not to say Asomatous Besmirchment isn’t brutal — this will turn an unsuspecting preschool teacher’s head into brain chili. But the focus is more on memorability. There’s a hard-earned catchiness to all of these components that facilitates stick-to-your-ribs satiation. In a genre of bands that evaporate in your mouth like fuel-grade moonshine, Unbirth exhibits a long-lasting savoriness, something you want to continue to suck on.
And, like a five-star tasting menu, real thought and care went into these songs. That’s what sets Unbirth apart. I hate to keep bringing this up in a year-end list that is already so heavy on feeling feelings and handling humanity, but Asomatous Besmirchment sounds like people are playing it. It’s like how the weaponized earworminess of an everything-corrected modern pop song can’t really step to the timelessness of a Motown melody. There’s just something about real humans making real art that will always resonate. So, compared to theoretical riffists and calculator chasers, Unbirth has an advantage: it wants to be a real boy. The HAL 9000 sample fits, then, not because it’s a nod to the music’s mechanistic quality, but because it’s the sound of the machines surrendering.
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3. Kakothanasy – Metagonism
There’s a clarity to what Kakothanasy does. There’s no ‘battery of squelch cannons’ guitar tone. There’s no ‘blown-out speakers in a 1995 Toyota Trecel’ production. There’s no ‘dragging two cinder blocks together’ vocals. (That one is pretty cool, admittedly.) There’s nothing to hide behind.
So, Metagonism, the Swiss trio’s second full-length, is like playing on expert mode. There’s no room for error. Kakothanasy has to possess the raw skills to succeed. It does.
As the related-band credits — Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish, Grotesquerie, Anachronism, Cenotaph, and Focal Dystonia — attest, everyone in Kakothanasy is absurdly talented, including drummer Florent Duployer, who is in the running as the best brutal death metal drummer not named Lille Gruber. And there is something Defeated Sanity-esque to the way Kakothanasy moves, smash cutting between mainframe-melting tech sections and smackdown slams of the Suffocation variety. Lesser bands attempting to unify that dichotomy sound like a student driver learning to drive a stick shift — concussion-causing herks and jerks. Kakothanasy is smooth.
Yeah, smooth. I don’t know if you can call a band this brutish and bloodthirsty graceful, but Kakothanasy has a gymnast-like economy of motion that makes it sound so fluid. Like, it’s rare to get an album that is obviously so effortful sound so effortless. In turn, I’ve tried to replay this album to death, and I can’t tire of it. There’s no resistance, no drag, and thus no fatigue. It’s a testament to Kakothanasy’s clarity, not just sonically, but also its songwriting mastery. Johann Sebastian Bach wishes he composed this. That doofus never wrote a slam in his life.
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2. 夢遊病者 – РЛБ30011922
РЛБ30011922 seems to start in medias res. It’s not disorienting, though. It’s like a conversation starting back up after a librarian’s “shhh.” It’s a neat trick, a songwriting sleight of hand that must’ve taken eons to workshop to sound so straightforward. There you are, a minute in to this 37-minute, 10-part suite presented as an instrumental single track, and you feel like 夢遊病者 has already been laying the groundwork for a whole album. You just know it without knowing quite where РЛБ30011922 is going to go; it’s like how every eulogy is relatable, no matter the contents. This album is a complex work, one that, per the band’s admission, took nearly three years to make. You can tell. There is so much going on, so many details, so many elements you’ll never catch until your 20th spin. Nonetheless, that ineffable familiarity turns it into such an easy listen.
Over its career, these players from parts unknown have operated within the ruleless domains of dreams and hazy remembrances. 夢遊病者’s albums are kind of like déjà vu and jamais vu crashing together. There are recognizable components, idioms that we’ve probably even internalized passively: rock, jazz, metal, etc. But, like a particularly wild lucid dream, the way 夢遊病者 smears those components into each other feels so post-everything, avant-garde in the truest sense of the term.
That said, what makes the band remarkable is that it’s not really pushing the bounds of music so much as the feelings that music imparts. РЛБ30011922 operates according to the curious logic of memory, of what the brain retains and reconstructs, and what it renders in a space-saving fuzziness. 夢遊病者 is pretty clever in this regard.
As previously discussed, РЛБ30011922 cycles through so many styles: Laddio Bolocko skronks, PIL dub rhythms, Mono build-ups, Tortoise-style Can-isms, and far, far more. The metal is similarly varied: fractured trad, scudding clouds of post-black metal, funhouse mirror Thin Lizzy leads. 夢遊病者’s bag is deep.
But 夢遊病者 doesn’t approach its style forays literally. These sections aren’t direct references; they’re not tracks on a mixtape meant to make other music nerds pop. Instead, they’re almost like half-recalled scenes, flashes of buried sensations, the connective-tissue paragraphs in a bigger autobiography that you can’t quite quote. They’re the experiences that have been fermented and barrel-aged in the subconscious. They’re the makings of you that evade summation. They’re the background radiation of awareness.
As such, РЛБ30011922‘s structure plays with an intriguing contradiction. On the one hand, 夢遊病者 worked its ass off to make sure the album has a thrust, a driving forward momentum. It goes somewhere, which gives the appearance of linearity because that’s how we perceive the passage of time. On the other hand, РЛБ30011922 feels unstuck in time in the same way you can review memories in your head non-chronologically. Still, those memories all blend together into a greater whole. Your experience of them, of knowing you lived life on either side, provides an overarching sense of coherence. And 夢遊病者 achieves exactly that. Even its most clashing inclinations sound like they’re never out of place, never inapposite. The stylistic shifts, then, blur together as memories do, while the resulting musical sections possess a sequential logicality. Genius.
Here’s the other genius thing, though: Even though 夢遊病者’s sense of flow makes everything sound seamless, the sections can still stick out. Attentive listeners will discover all kinds of hooks. For instance, following an occult doom passage that might as well be a warped Pentagram record, РЛБ30011922 tosses in a section that will leave you flipping through your mental rolodex to guess the classic rock radio riff it’s alluding to. “Burnin’ For You”? “Carry on Wayward Son”? It always catches my ear and centers my attention. It’s like how canon events strip away the buffers that insulate us from reality, allowing us to momentarily become more aware of our surroundings. And that riff vibrates some held-dear memory of mine. It pings something deep within me. I feel something very specific. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. 夢遊病者 didn’t have my particular experience in mind, but it was aiming at a feeling shared by many people, a universal familiarity. 夢遊病者 is telling a story through feelings, one played by an instrument made of memories. It’s like the Chill Out for core emotions. The narrative — likely a memorial to someone very dear to them, an eternal aural elegy — is 夢遊病者’s. But the feelings? Those ring out in all of us.
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1. Weeping Sores – The Convalescence Agonies
While making Weeping Sores’s first album, 2019’s False Confessions, singer/guitarist Doug Moore injured his shoulder. “I was overtraining with heavy weights,” Moore told Invisible Oranges‘s Colin Dempsey. “Part of it was also that I was practicing a lot for that record and I never gave myself a break. If I wasn’t lifting, then I was playing guitar, and I was never letting that joint recover as much as it needed to, as it turned out. And that led to what is, was, and still is a degenerative condition in my rotator cuff tendons, which has been somewhat reconstituted into their prior form. But it’s not the same as it used to be.”
Lifting? Out. Farewell, dumb gym. Guitar? Farewell, old playing style. Moore had to relearn the instrument. “People who have traumatic brain injuries say they have to relearn how to walk,” he said. “And it’s not that their bodies have changed, it’s not that their legs are a different length or something, but they still have to reconstitute the muscle memory and the psychological instincts that allow them to perform that motion that accomplishes walking. [Relearning guitar] felt the same way. The way that I move and hold my shoulder in general was transformed by that injury. My life is different in a lot of ways, too. It holistically transformed me in the way that a temporary disability can.”
From the outside, Moore’s injury almost seems like a sliding doors moment, provided that, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow had her arm wrecked by the titular door. After all, it wasn’t just the guitar playing that got updated. “I think of that as being a before and after moment in my life where the injury led me to different habits, a different routine, a different career, a different way of thinking about myself, a different way of thinking about the world [that] had implications for my ideas about politics and relations with other people,” Moore explained. “It was a profound experience in a way that I think things that happen to you can be.”
And it is profound, an upending life event that goes far beyond the trivializing sports-injury-report-influenced framework sometimes applied to recovery, that there is a defined timetable with a forecasted end. Even for average Joes, those catastrophic-coverage-having castoffs who aren’t multi-million-dollar human investments protected by their multi-billion-dollar franchises, the idea that there is a “hurt” and then a “better” collapses time, minimizing the purgatorial interval in between. Recovery becomes a story. We assume the story moves linearly. We assume there will be a better. The anguish, the pain, the suffering that happens along the way is just the plotting of that story, or, more often, the plot occurring off-screen.
Actually living within the day-to-day of recovery is, of course, different. “In general, my sense of independence and self-efficacy were affected,” Moore remembered. “It was, frankly, a very painful process and one of the worst stretches of my life to go through. To have to spend so much time and energy and money reconstituting my ability to do things that I’d taken for granted for my entire adulthood.” That packs a psychological punch. That door doesn’t slide. An injury affects more than just the meat. Its invasive roots reach down to the soul. And that’s not something that necessarily goes away. Even if things get better and the roots recede, what did those roots leave behind? What pain remains? Who even are you when you come out the other side?
***
A few years ago, I was suddenly afflicted by chronic nosebleeds. These weren’t your usual rusty pipe dribblers. No, it was like the elevator door opening in The Shining. I’d be minding my business, and then a crime scene would pour out of my nose. Seriously, the amount of plasma that flowed forth could’ve cut the production cost of a proposed Dead Alive sequel in half.
Now, I’m not one to be squeamish. I’m not one to ask for help. But the seemingly hourly nosebleeds legitimately terrified me. So, I went to urgent care. I went to the doctor. I went to a specialist. For the unforgivable sin of trying to get better, all I got was this lousy cauterization, which turned my inner nostrils into shoe leather. No matter, the bleeding continued, so I went to more specialists. I swear to you that the last guy jammed an endoscope up my snorter and said, “Well, that sucks.” That sucks! That was the diagnosis! That was my sentence. The American health care system banged its gavel and said I just had to live with it.
The knock-on effects of living with it were severe. Panic attacks tormented me, consuming my thoughts and disabling my coping mechanisms. I was afraid to go out in public lest I Andrew WK in someone’s presence. When I had to face the world, I brought a fanny pack filled with what I grimly started referring to as “nose tools.” I looked ridiculous. Granted, I’m not exactly a hot commodity on my best days — my Hinge profile wouldn’t even threaten the uptime of a server running on an Atari 2600 — but my bag of weapons to hold the line in the snout wars was pretty much the death knell of my dating life. Worse, I stopped doing all the things that usually keep my mind off of dying alone. In fact, I didn’t do anything. I simply fused myself to my sofa like a barnacle on a hull, watched three-hour YouTube videos of mechanics trying to get barn-find cars up and running, and waited for my nose to bleed. Soon, after I stooped so low that I was watching golf influencer videos, I was like, “…is this it?” I couldn’t envision a future. Tomorrow started becoming an abstract concept. There was only a godawful present, one that made me increasingly tired of treading water in the middle of the sea of depression.
After a stretch of laborious recovery that felt like finally climbing out of a grave only to fall into another one, things got better. Thanks to an elaborate regimen that has kept the petroleum jelly industry afloat, the nosebleeds eventually abated to an acceptable level. The dark clouds cleared. The calendar started filling up. I had a life again, provided that a well-lived life can be measured by the number of brutal death metal albums one purchases.
Looking back, I’m embarrassed by the lack of resiliency and stoicism I thought I possessed — one little difference in my life, one hiccup in the expected, turned everything upside down. Optimistically, recovery instilled within me a sense of respect and gratitude for the miracle of general good health. The hold I have on what I consider even a blasé baseline is so tenuous; I have no right to it, no guarantees. One bad break, one itsy bitsy malady, and it’s a return trip to hell. Conversely, my glass-half-empty predisposition makes me wonder, “Did all of me come back from that first trip?” I still recoil when a Q-tip I’ve pulled out of my nose is spotted with blood. I still feel the mounting anxiety when the weather starts to cool. I think part of me is down in that hell. I’m forever stained by a glimpse of the bottom. And so, for a version of myself that I’ll never be again, the question posed during my darker days had been answered: That was, in fact, “it.”
***
A hurt emanates from deep within The Convalescence Agonies. Simply put, Weeping Sores’s music aches. Like the death/doom ideal, it evokes that kind of powerful pang that hollows out your heart. But Doug Moore and drummer Stephen Schwegler’s second full-length also deals in a more physical type of ache. The riffs and rhythms have a heavy gait, mirroring that inexpressible phantom force of bodily fatigue that continuously compresses you downward, making every facet of life more labored. Moore’s vocals and leads are bolts of pain shooting up and down limbs. The layers and harmonies played by celloist Annie Blythe and keyboardist Brendon Randall-Myers — two guests on this it-takes-an-NYC-village record — sometimes impart the numbness of damaged nerves. The Convalescence Agonies isn’t just hurt, it is the howl of an injured body.
But it’s also…beautiful? Weeping Sores does better than many of its miserable peers by varying its attack, preventing The Convalescence Agonies from getting mired in the idle stasis of real-world pain and depression. Esoteric’s Greg Chandler mastered this album, and his band is a pretty good point of comparison, not so much sonically, but in terms of its level of comfort with changing tempi and moods. Likewise, The Convalescence Agonies plumbs the depths while also ascending to reveries. It is fast; it is slow. It is brutal; it is beautiful. At a technical level, these welcome contrasts to the album’s larger themes make the music more kinetic and dynamic. In a spiritual sense, though, The Convalescence Agonies takes on the contours, the ups and downs, of a life.
Let’s stick with the technical for a moment. Naturally, given the membership, Weeping Sores’s musicianship is excellent. Between The Convalescence Agonies and Pyrrhon’s Exhaust, Schwegler is really on one right now. His drumming is always so fluid, enlivening every passage with a click-shunning authenticity that prods you, and really shepherds you, into remaining immersed in the music. Moore matches Schwegler by playing with such feel, seemingly animating each riff with relatable pathos. And the riff arsenal has been diversified. The unique ‘Warning playing Morbid Angel’ brand of hellish melancholy is still present, which puts it in the family tree of the death/doom old guard without being a blood relative. But the poles of Weeping Sores’s dualities have been pushed further apart.
Riffffffffsssssss. There are some nasty chugs on The Convalescence Agonies that belong to an older, more embryonic style acquainted with primordial darkness. Ah, but on the other end, there are also some really nimble picking that floats atop the rhythms. The expansion of extremes applies to the vocals, too. The primary mode of communication is a guttural rumble of thunder that will exceed the tolerance of weaklings. Ah, but there are also these mournful cries that are like a person down on their knees, beseeching a higher power to answer why they’re being assailed by misfortune. It’s so vulnerable. It’s another fold in this manifold album, one further diversified by key contributions from guests Lev Sloujitel (banjo on “Empty Vessel Hymn”) and Peter Lloyd (guitar on “Sprawl in the City of Sorrow”). Weeping Sores has dimensions.
One of those dimensions brings us back to the spiritual. To me, at a very base level, The Convalescence Agonies is almost like a surrogate for suffering. I feel like you can get something out of it even if you’ve lucked out and thus far cruised over life’s black ice; you can’t not empathize with it. But the way the album’s flow maps to rehabilitation, be it physical rehabilitation or desperately trying to rebound from existence’s many psychic slights, is so powerful. The Convalescence Agonies nails the exploration of the soul-annihilating depths of recovery — the onerous work of restoration occurring between the hurt and the better. This album is a friend forged in pain, one that knows how futile it can feel to pick up the pieces while coming to terms with the fact that some of those pieces can no longer be found. There’s catharsis in that. It can be a salve for those in the depths. And for those on the other side, it can be a brush that removes rust.
But it’s also…hopeful? Maybe I’m projecting, but it’s there for me. It’s this little whisper of hope that says, however quietly, “This is not it.” It makes the case for heeding the survival drive, even after the foundation of one’s mortality crumbles. Things have changed, and that’s fine. Things are hard, and that’s fine. Slowly but surely, those mantras move in and out like a tide, turning everything smooth.
There’s a part at the end of the closing track that I think about a lot:
Such is the body’s offering
Its seasons turn, relentless and swift
Its pain which teaches nothing
No lesson to learn; no wisdom, no gift
But the passion of transfiguration
With each convalescence
I am reborn, I cease to exist
How does “The Convalescence Agonies” cease to exist? With a duet between keyboards and cello, a hushed denouement after the album’s metallic crush. As Randall-Myers’s chords grow slightly more hopeful, Blythe’s legato starts to fleck away. It’s what remains and what doesn’t. It’s the hurt that never leaves the better. But it also answers a question with another question. “Is this it?” Well, is it?
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To, DoTS. Love, all of us.
