What Are You Listening To Now - The Fallen Edition

OK, I’ll bite. Is the other one Warning’s “Watching From A Distance”?

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Hela - "A Reign to Conquer" (2026)

I have followed spanish doom crew Hela since their earliest days and have found them to be consistent deliverers of understated female-fronted doom metal. They are one of those bands that don't push the boat out too far from familiar shores and are quite unlikely to be anyone's favourites doom metal band, but keep plugging away, refining their sound and carving out a niche for themselves.

"A Reign to Conquer" features half a dozen 7-8 minute tracks that follow a similar pattern. Taking their cues from post-metal, they generally begin softly and serenely and build in intensity as the track progresses. The intensity level never really rises above a mildly elevated pulse rate, though, and the band don't really seem to be ploughing the old atmospheric sludge furrow of catharsis through ferocity, but are content to merely shake their proverbial fists at the sky rather than tear it down. They remain melodic throughout with some doleful riffs and new vocalist, Raquel Navarro, has a plaintive, yearning style of vocal delivery that underpins the melancholy atmosphere so vital to decent doom metal.

What Hela do they do pretty well and both the songwriting and performances are proficient and point to a very professional outfit who know what they want to deliver and exactly how go about it. This all sounds like criticism through faint praise I know and I like the band, but the simple truth is that they are a decent doom metal outfit who produce albums that are enjoyable enough, but which will seldom stick with you for too long after they end.

There is a serious side note which needs addressing regarding the production which may negatively impact most people's enjoyment - it certainly did mine. This is the fact that the album features terrible sound compression which makes it feel like it is being rammed into your ears, rather than allowing the nuances of the music as written to be experienced. This is especially sad because this feels like an album that is written with subtlety and contrast in mind. For example, listen to the album's best track "Emerald Mirror", which is amped up to levels that cause actual sound distortion when it is evidently written as a far more subtle exploration of light and shade which I feel is seriously undermined by the production. Even Raquel's vocals are distorted by the mix and a more sympathetic production job would have seen my score elevated a good half-star or more I believe.

3/5

Boghaunter - "Writhe" EP (2018)

I picked "Writhe" up on its release via Bandcamp and, at time of writing eight years later, it remains the only release from the New Hampshire trio, amounting to two tracks spanning 25 minutes of material. Boghaunter's version of doom metal is heavily atmospheric and dips its toes into atmospheric sludge waters more than a little. Opener "Constellation Vows" builds on clean and clear lighter motifs and then batters them down with some crushing riffs and corrosively harsh vocals, only for them to reassert themselves in a to-and-fro of contrasting and complementary tidal shifts. This feels to me to be more than the usual atmo-sludge trick of build, build release, the two atmospheric poles weaving together like the intertwining twin serpents of celtic legend and displaying a nice level of songwriting maturity. Second track, "Ordeals in Stillness" is less intricate and more straightforward doom metal, albeit no less impressive, employing a memorable and melodic, gravitationally heavy riff which is accented by sparely used keys and soaring lead work. These provide a doom-laden foundation, dripping with melancholy over which the sludgy vocals bark and snarl in protest.

I was impressed by this opening salvo from Boghaunter back in 2018 and remain so to this day and it is a great shame that so promising a debut wasn't the springboard for a career of note. Even sadder is that there seems to have been very little activity from the three guys elsewhere, although I have just found the 2025 debut three-track EP from death doom band Departure which features Boghaunter guitarist and vocalist Michael Demers on lead guitar and which, although it is more straight-up death doom, is still a good listen. I guess the history of metal is strewn with such tales of exceedingly promising acts, for whatever reason, falling by the wayside while lesser talents thrive, but I am grateful that we got this beauty of a release anyway.

4/5

YDI - "Black Dust" (1985)

This one has been eating away at me for a while. Whenever I look at the earliest releases I haven't rated yet for the Fallen, this ugly, yellow and black fucking cover is always there staring at me like some recurring monochrome nightmare. I mean, look at it, it is fucking horrible. So today, as I am ploughing through some 1985 releases, I decided to get to grips with it and see what hides behind that menacing and manic-looking face. Well folks, don't be fooled because behind that ugly cover is an album of even more ugly-sounding music. Taking the idea of merging hardcore punk with the slower, looser and more distorted sound of Saint Vitus as originally posited by Black Flag's "My War" released the previous year, YDI have produced a noisy bastard child that dispenses with all the niceties of Black Flag's trailblazer.

This is filthy-sounding, virtually demo quality hardcore punk that has taken on board some of the aesthetics of the emergent doom metal scene to produce an album that sounds like it was recorded in an afternoon in the gutter of a Philadelphia back alley littered with used syringes and condoms. If anybody ever thought The Dead Kennedys and Black Flag were street punks then they will find "Black Dust" a fucking revelation that makes those guys sound like they went to Eton with singer Neil "Jackal Ssexzombie" Perry spewing forth a rasping bellow that makes Henry Rollins sound like a right stuck-up toff! This is such a dirty-sounding, gritty and groundbreaking record that I am genuinely not even sure if it really belongs in the Fallen at all. As is often the case with such revolutionary records, this is not easy to pigeon-hole, its hinting at what sludge would become being still in a very rudimentary stage of evolution. It is, however very noisy, very brash with an abrasive sound, ugly lyrics and a fuck-you-we-really-don't-care-what-you-think attitude that demands respect even if you don't enjoy the album itself. For myself, I am going to need to spend a bit more time with it to try to really get under its skin. I have it pegged at a 3.5/5 at the minute, but I feel this may rise as the album's essential ugliness smoothes itself out with further exposure and the involuntary gag reflex that it arouses subsides.

Usnea - Portals Into Futility (2017)

Metal Archives lists Usnea as “Blackened Funeral Doom Metal” which instantly coloured me interested. Having snapped up this album into my digital library after hearing the track ‘Eidolons and the Increate’ on the April Fallen playlist, I was eager to explore the whole record in some more critical detail. A backlog of albums to review that seems to only get longer, has meant that I am only just now getting around to dumping my thoughts into type. Thankfully though, this period has not seen any of my initial enthusiasm for Portals Into Futility dulled at all. When your band sounds like a cross between Bell Witch and Graves at Sea, you are guaranteed to drag a smile out of my otherwise grizzled expression. That’s right, music that explores the hopelessness of existence, the depravity of a dystopian world whilst also introducing themes of cosmic horror is a pleasing concept to me. A sort of much needed dose of reality being laid bare alongside some extra metaphors to really underline what a shitshow this planet is most of the time.

Whilst I may have just laid praise at Usnea’s door for their blunt summary of life, it is the more cosmic sound to their funereal atmospheres that I think keeps me more interested. Portals Into Futility has a clever way of hinting things always have the capacity to get worse, to spiral further out of our control, to reach levels of despondency that are frankly unearthly. Whilst I am going to flat-out challenge the “blackened” description of their sound, the sterility of their bleaker passages of music simply asks, “is this is as good as things get this side of the dirt”? It is perhaps only their general disdain for life that I can match to any blackened references that are inferred. Vocally, there is a definitive desperation to how Joel or Justin (both appear to be credited for the vocals) deliver their musings. Yet I would not compare this to anything in the black metal realm, if anything they are clearly more sludge orientated. The guitars also may possess a swarming quality on tracks such as ‘Lathe of Heaven’ but he pacing here is very much funeral doom or glacial sludge riffs.

Give me the murky and unfathomable depths of ‘Demon Haunted World’ all day, any day and I will gladly bathe in them until that mire is engrained in my skin. When that Bell Witch bass kicks in I am in utter joy on this track even if it suggests one of the more positive sounding moments on the whole album (that’s how bleak this thing is). The album artwork (which Justin is also credited with collaboration on – busy chap) sums up the contents perfectly. Ultimately, there is no comfort to be found is what that artwork says to me, and Portals Into Futility is an uncomfortable listen. Closing with a punishing, nineteen-minute track shows that the end is more agonising than the run up. Buckle up folks. Strap on in. This is going to be a rough one.

4/5

Morag Tong - "Through Clouded Time" EP (2016)

I thought I would try to showcase a few of my favourite obscure doom bands through these pages, so this is the first of, hopefully quite a few lesser known releases. I will try to limit it to ones no one else has rated yet.

My review:

I have been a fan of London's Morag Tong for a good decade now, since the release of this debut. four-track EP back in 2016. They are named for the fictional guild of assassins featured in The Elder Scrolls game Morrowind and their reverb-drenched doom metal is as influenced as much by stoner metal as you would expect from a band of RPG-ing nerds. My original one-line review for this went "stoner doom that's nice 'n' slow and as heavy as an anchor strapped to an anvil that's tied to a millstone" and you know what, that remains true, but there is actually a bit more to it than just sheer weight so I thought I had better elaborate.

The riffs have an in-built bluesiness that reaches back as far as Sabbath's debut but which are delivered with such heft and distortion that they sound mountainously and crushingly heavy. The soloing, such as it is, has a psychedelic, spacey tinge that is fed from the band's stoner roots and which is aided by some Hawkwind-ish electronics buried quite deeply in the mix. I hesitate to call it trippy, though, because the tempo is so lethargic and the riffs just so fucking heavy that I am unsure if anything with this amount of heft can ever be labelled as such, although the title track "Through Clouded Time" does feature some quieter, more trippy moments, such as the introductory couple of minutes or so which almost sounds like a very heavy version of Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" and a quite funky bass breakdown just after the halfway point. The two tracks either side, "Godhead" and "The Eyes of Men" are a bit more straight forward but deliver such devastatingly heavy doom riffs that they are still worthy of attention in their own rights.

Drummer Adam Asquith also handles vocals which are perfectly functional for this style of stonerised doom, whereas his drumming is really good within the confines of the genre and he and bassist Sam Lewis both featuring prominently enough in the mix to lay down a super-solid foundation upon which dual guitarists Alex Clarke and Lewis Crane can lay down the towering monoliths of the riffs. The four are obviously deeply steeped in the world of stoner doom and they sound like solid technical musicians perfectly able to translate their intentions into music, so there is a definite authenticity about what they delivered here.

In summary, this is a very impressive twenty-three minutes that handed out an attention-grabbing calling card to the UK's doom metal afficianados. Unfortunately I felt 2018's full-length "Last Knell of Om" failed to live up to this promise and I have yet to hear 2023's Grieve, so this stands as the band's high water mark for me so far. Truth is though, even if they never bettered this, it would still stand as a worthy testament. I was then and remain still, mightily impressed.

4/5

Slow - "V - Oceans" (2017)

Today's selection from the Vault of the Underappreciated is a slab of funeral doom goodness from  Belgium's Slow. Here is my review:

Slow is a funeral doom project of prodigious belgian Déhà, who is perhaps better known for his black metal and blackgaze work, but who is also a proficient doomster with acts like Yhdarl and Wolvennest. He has released seven albums under the Slow banner, with "V-Oceans" unsurprisingly being number five and, probably, my favourite. This is the last of the Slow albums that were produced as a solo project, Déhà since having been joined by lyricist Lore Boeykens who also contributes bass and backing vocals.

Anyone even remotely familiar with Déhà's other projects will be unsurprised to hear a significant post-metal and -gazey element to Slow's funereal dirges, but make no mistake this is still ponderously heavy stuff. The vocals are of the gravel-throated, abyssal demon bellowing kind that are the cornerstone of so many fantastic funeral doom albums and are more than ably delivered here by the main man himself. As he intones at the beginning of "Ténèbres", "This is not meant to bring you joy, this is not meant to give you any solace," and it surely doesn't if you take its message literally yet, ironically, if you are a lover of the melancholy and desperate atmospherics of funeral doom then it may well bring you great joy indeed (it certainly does for me).

With tempos that are measured by a calendar rather than a metronome, the five, 10-minute plus tracks here crawl under your skin and sit there draining your optimism like a vampiric parasite feasting on the mind's positive energy, leaving its host bereft and borne down by the weight of existence. The riffs are monumental chords that swell like tsunamis, given additional heft and gravitas by layered synths and choral effects which thankfully don't swamp the guitar and drums, but which add their weight to the crushing mass subtlely enough so as not to be distracting. "Oceans" covers a theme that has served funeral doom very well over the years with its huge swells of sound being an exceedingly effective artistic interpreter of oceanic environs and deep sea tectonics, here being used as a metaphor for the unalterable inevitability of death, in other words, all the best sentiments of funeral doom.

The number of ratings for Slow albums on RYM is paltry with this being the most-rated with a touch over 300, yet this is funeral doom of the highest order that deserves to be considered up there with giants of the genre like Bell Witch and Esoteric. OK, maybe not Esoteric, but everybody else anyway! Criminally overlooked, for me this is a top drawer entry into the funeral doom pantheon.

4.5/5