#post metal

Shrineburner are a Chicago post/sludge metal trio who keep their songs from dragging by injecting the occasional black metal section. Their debut full-length Hymns Of Despair will be self-released on September 11th.

[photo by Tom Birch]

Relic Point - Self Punishment (2020)

Writing this because this is such a great album, like I cannot find a single thing about it that I don't like. Elephant Man pt 2 is such an incredible track.

We Lost the Sea - Departure Songs (2015)

One of the more beloved albums and bands of the modern post rock scene, it was recorded after their vocalist Chris Torpy passed away in 2013, leaving the band to continue to this day as an instrumental band.

Neurosis | An Undying Love for a Burning World

There is a primordial terror lurking when the tubes in the amplifiers start to glow and the low-end sub-bass hum fills the room like shifting tectonic plates, a sense that after ten years of silence we have arrived at the ragged edge of a world where sound is an engineered ritual of survival. On An Undying Love for a Burning World, Neurosis constructs a staggering post-metal monolith that bridges our dying earth with the hollowed chambers of the human spirit, opening the floodgates with "We Are Torn Wide Open." It strikes like a fifty-second laceration of pure feedback and throat-shredding vocal roars, a terrifying warning before collapsing directly into the suffocating weight of "Mirror Deep." That second movement is an oppressive, agonizing titan, hard to withstand as Scott Evans' bone-dry production, crushing wall-of-sound distortion, and Jason Roeder's floor-tom tribal rhythms drag the listener through deep vowel assonance and inverted agrarian horror, where we no longer cultivate life but sow fields of fire and plow fruitless dirt, watching ourselves turn to drifting ash under an indifferent sky. But then comes the absolute pinnacle of the record, "First Red Rays." It opens with an eerie, spine-chilling clean guitar motif and delicate cymbal brushwork that creeps along the floorboards before exploding into an eight-minute, violent awakening of down-tuned baritone chugs and soaring harmonic feedback, tracing our wretched crawl through beastly degradation up to a blinding cosmic dawn where the vocal interplay between Steve Von Till and Aaron Turner severs earth from heaven to expose our silent, empty origins.

Then the record loses its tempo and grinds down into "Blind," a nine-minute endurance test that feels slow, agonizingly sluggish in its low-BPM drum cadence and heavy sub-bass drag, like being pulled by your ankles through freezing mud. It demands every drop of your patience, using agonizingly drawn-out chord suspensions to force you into a crucible of total existential negation, stripping away material lies through the sheer weight of sorrow. But out of that suffocating sludge erupts "Seething and Scattered," and fuck yes, there is the rage, a furious explosion driven by aggressive drum fills and jagged, lacerating sludge riffs that treat modern societal alienation like a broken Tower of Babel, slicing through manufactured division with raw visceral heat. That momentum stumbles slightly into "Untethered," drifting into an uninteresting fog through its middle arrangements, though it is rescued by one hell of a cool, razor-sharp riff that slices right through the dense acoustic-electric mix and the claustrophobia of a collective madness staggering through the dark.

Crossing into the final stretch, "In the Waiting Hours" opens with magnificent promise through clean, fingerpicked guitar phrasing before its ten-minute drone drags on a bit too long into the night, yet its layered vocal trade-offs and swelling noise textures still carry the ache of a battered humanity clawing its way up from the mire of blood and greed with torn fingers under a scorching sun. Everything finally converges in "Last Light," a seventeen-minute, breathtakingly powerful finale tracked with Randall Dunn that closes the record with absolute gravity. Driven by slow, heavy tribal polyrhythms and crushing, down-tuned chord progressions, it expands our cosmic decay into an agrarian funeral where a guilty humanity is crushed beneath the physical weight of time, forced to watch the land itself weep as we freeze solid in an unending, fatal descent. It is a bruised, imperfect, monumentally crafted piece of art that refuses to offer easy comfort.

8.5/10