Release Date: 20 March 2026
Song Count: 8
Duration: 1 hour, 3 minutes, 30 seconds
Rating: 6.8/10
Description:
Song Count: 8
Duration: 1 hour, 3 minutes, 30 seconds
Rating: 6.8/10
Description:
Jumping right back into the rabbit hole of gnarly riffs and gnarlier vocal howls, we have the Californian sludge metal band Neurosis with their twelfth and most recent album An Undying Love for a Burning World. This marks the long-standing band's first full-length release since their return from their hiatus back in 2019 following one of the founders being kicked out for engaging in familial domestic abuse and violence, and acts as a sort of outlet for emotional expression for the other members after the setbacks they have faced over the course of that time. A heavy and indulgent piece about holding onto any sort of meaning in an increasingly divided and anxiety-inducing existence, this album is not here to play around and leave and makes its intentions of brutally setting in very clear from the first notes.
With stretched-out tracks that naturally evolve from one starting melody drenched in gloom, the tracks follow the common sludge metal pathway of approaching metal musicality. The vocalists' performances are raw, filled with the despair and uncertainty that the album aims to fully display in its medium; the instrumentation reflects this through parallel patterns repeating over the course of each song, albeit spiralling down into further darkness the longer they progress. Especially the last two of these tacked at the end, "In the Waiting Hours" and "Last Light" lasting over 10 and almost 17 minutes respectively, see a series of gradual musical progressions throughout, making use out of their expanded time to come in with both hard and expressive as well as quiet and more lightly treading moments.
Perhaps metal for yours truly has always been more about going all in on either musical extremities, aggression or melodies interwoven into a style commonly perceived as "abrasive", and so sludge metal and doom metal may not be subgenres that ever climb up to the top of the personal ranks. Nevertheless, An Undying Love for a Burning World is a record of great artistry that deserves plenty of respect for its extremely effective representation of its themes and mood in sight, and includes some tracks to enjoy even for those lesser interested in the rather slowly treading, melancholy-building ways of this kind of metal. Definitely a piece of much skill that is easy to acknowledge as such and a great work from the remaining Neurosis members picking up the pieces from where they creatively left off and letting their deeper doubts and thoughts out to the world through their well-crafted work.