Style: Sludge Metal, Post-Metal (Harsh Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Cult of Luna, EyeHateGod, Acid Bath, Khemmis, Dvne, Mastodon, Inter Arma
Country: United States, AR
Release date: 14 March 2025

Awakening from the Arkansas underground in 1996, Rwake are ancient, nearly thirty years into their journey at the time of this review, with a respectable body of work behind them. Rooted in sludge metal tradition, their sound fuses scathing hardcore vocals, mid-paced melodicism, doomy expanses, and tinges of death metal reminiscent of Acid Bath—a volatile mix that gives rise to brooding, multi-dimensional compositions. After a string of releases beginning with Absence Due to Projection in 1998, the band truly made waves upon signing with Relapse Records for 2007’s Voices of Omens, their most aggressive album to date. That release earned them a tour across the eastern U.S. and a spot at the Texas metal festival Emissions from the Monolith, lifting them from obscurity into the spotlight of the American underground. They followed it with Rest, after which the band stepped away, as personal lives took precedence. Over a decade later, Rwake finally reemerge with their long-awaited return: The Return of Magik.

Such a long wait naturally invites skepticism about the band’s current inspiration and creative fire. In the face of this anticipation, Rwake offer a lineup change involving Austin Sublett stepping in to replace longtime guitarist Kris Graves. With Sublett, the looming nods to traditional doom—shades of Black Sabbath and Mournful Congregation—have largely faded. In their place are more dynamic textures: mid-tempo rhythms, a gloomy but aggressive melodicism, and anthemic passages that at times recall the grandeur of Candlemass. Another notable shift lies in the vocal delivery. The Return of Magik trades out Rest’s hardcore punk snarls for a caustic palette of high-pitched screeches, broken only by measured eruptions of visceral, rebellious shouts.

The songcraft on The Return of Magik is monolithic and variegated in texture, with even its shortest tracks stretching just shy of the eight-minute mark. Structurally, the album splits into two modes. Three songs—”You Swore We’d Always Be Together”, “The Return of Magik”, and “With Stardust Flowers”—are more riff-driven and immediate. Following that are two sprawling epics: ”Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration”, and “In After Reverse”. The epics struggle under their own weight, ambitious in scope but left wanting in their pacing, identity, and execution.

Within the style that Rwake indulge in, several key metrics define the greatness of a composition: balance, variety, pacing contrast, and an intuitive flow that ensures no passage overstays its welcome. “The Return of Magik” stands as the shining example of all these traits. It opens with tremolo-driven grooves, anthemic harmonies, and sharp melodic turns, before descending into a doomier section where bellowing punk vocals contrast tastefully with the caustic screams that came before. The song then circles back to a faster pace, closing with a final surge of urgency that ties the entire structure together. From the heterogeneous riffing to the overall balance each section brings, this track shows that Rwake are still as capable as they were the decade before.

The other two riff-driven tracks fall short of the excellence achieved by “The Return of Magik.” In “You Swore We’d Always Be Together,” tonal variety is present, shifting from dark dissonance to Mastodon-esque melodicism, but the pacing remains static, lacking the tempo changes necessary to create a structured sense of evolution. “With Stardust Flowers” carries a cry for greater ambition: the same ingredients that make the album’s title track so compelling are present, but the track ends too abruptly, feeling rushed and incomplete. Both songs are solid in isolation, but with greater dimensionality and structural expansion, they could have reached something far more impactful.

In the final stretch of the album, Rwake make bold leaps which stumble into drawn out messes. Here, the problem lies in failed experimentation. “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration” is an ambitious attempt at mystic intrigue that falls flat. Built around a spoken-word section that runs four minutes too long, what might have been an occultish—if vaguely hippie-flavored—atmosphere devolves into a long-winded rant that renders the rest of the track irrelevant. “In After Reverse” fails to a slightly lesser degree, pairing active riffing with a sluggish interlude. But that interlude, composed of whispered vocals and minimal ambient drones, feels bare and underdeveloped—an attempt at the quiet tension of a forest lurking with something unnamed instead evokes awkward emptiness. Both tracks cry out for stronger execution and a more refined approach to atmosphere and pacing.

Despite its fractured quality, The Return of Magik is a commendable return after more than a decade of silence. It is unclear if Rwake will release more albums in the future—but if so, then this album should serve as a moment of introspection. Let go of the ambitions of narrative-driven songs, tighten the standards for pacing and contrast, and lean more heavily into the band’s greatest strength: the volatile duality between harsh screams and hardcore snarls. There’s still power in Rwake’s sound, but it demands a clearer frame to truly shine.

Recommended tracks: “The Return of Magik”
You may also like: Mizmor, 16, Fange, Sunrot, Decline of the I
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: Relapse – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Rwake is:
– Chris Terry (vocals)
– Brittany Fugate (vocals)
– Jeff Morgan (drums, acoustic guitar, 12-string bass)
– Reid Raley (bass)
– Austin Sublett (guitar)
– John Judkins (guitar)

The post Review: Rwake – The Return of Magik appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Album Art by Paige Weatherwax

Style: Avant-Garde Metal, Progressive Metal (Mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Between The Buried and Me, Devin Townsend, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Mr. Bungle, Diablo Swing Orchestra
Country: United States, TN
Release date: 11 April 2025

Flummox are a band that defy singular definition. Are they death metal, bluegrass, circus music, musical theater, power punk, or psychedelic rock? If your answer is “all of the above—and then some,” you’re only beginning to grasp their ambition. Over a decade ago, Alyson Dellinger and Drew Jones birthed this Frankenstein of a band in the unlikely crucible of Tennessee—a state steeped in musical tradition. With the creative spark of new members and several years of maturing, Flummox hit their stride with 2022’s Rephlummoxed. With all its surreal, avant-garde grandeur, that album left one lingering question: how do you follow it up?

To understand how Southern Progress attempts to answer the album that preceded it, we first need to examine the structural blueprint of both records. Rephlummoxed built its identity on sprawling, multi-part compositions—songs whose lengths have a floor of five minutes and a ceiling of fourteen. The vast song lengths give the band’s pandemonium room to breathe, allowing the manic ambition to unfold at full scale. What emerged was bold, momentous, and endlessly engaging—a charismatic, aural riot fully earned by its ambition.

The architecture of Southern Progress sharply deviates from the long-form approach. Gone are the whimsical interludes and sprawling epics, save for the final song; in their place, Flummox attempt to use a leaner, more streamlined framework, with most tracks hovering around four to five minutes in length. None of the band’s genre-blurring mastery is lost—there’s still enough stylistic whiplash and personality to earn the approval of Mike Patton or Frank Zappa—but something about this new structural gamble doesn’t quite work.

A dissonance of expectation permeates this album, manifesting as a subtle but persistent disconnect between form and function. Everything that made Rephlummoxed soar feels truncated here. Something essential in the magic of their chaos gets lost when it’s compressed to the length of a standard pop rock song. That tension leaves many tracks feeling like incomplete snapshots of something greater, or ideas that might have been better served by embracing more conventional songcraft.

The first two tracks of the album, “What We’re in For…” and “Southern Progress,” immediately showcase the record’s fundamental confusion. The former opens with proggy, deranged grooves, then settles into a gentler, swing-inflected rhythm. From there, it pivots back into metal grooves that almost carry a sense of symphonic grandeur—only for Flummox to completely kill the momentum by abruptly oscillating between still sound samples and disjointed riffing, before trailing off into a full minute of ambient drift. “Southern Progress” then kicks in with an almost whiplash transition, fusing proggy power punk, death metal, and sludge. It starts off promising but soon collapses into a series of metal breakdowns that occupy far too much of the track’s runtime, before hastily returning to its original theme and ending without resolution. Both songs feel like fragments of a greater idea, pieces that would have been better served by being combined into one longer, more ambitious work.

Following these disorienting misfires is “Long Pork,” which assaults the listener with monolithic, sludgy riffing that drones through your bones, steadily building in intensity before attempting a vaguely post-rock crescendo. The whole endeavor falls flat because there either isn’t enough material to properly earn the climax or the song ends immediately upon reaching it.

Southern Progress closes with its longest track, “Coyote Gospel,” clocking in at just over eight minutes. Flummox clearly aimed to end the album with something grand as it’s a concept song tackling the hypocritical, cynical reality of Christian society. What they actually delivered, however, is a track that confuses concept with songcraft. “Coyote Gospel” comes across as a smorgasbord of ideas whose disjointedness outweighs its charm and gets in the way of any kind of momentum it could possibly build.

A few glimpses of coherence appear on this record. “Siren Shock” locks onto a well-structured, quirky southern metal aesthetic, with riffs that draw from the most charming corners of country rock—only amped up into a glorious rodeo that sounds like it could trample the stars out of the sky. “Executive Dysfunction” blends imperious sludge with tongue-in-cheek nods to Mr. Bungle, before shifting in its second half into lush prog and symphonic black metal. It’s chaotic, but perfectly balanced and fully realized, a rare moment where Flummox’s madness feels not just unleashed, but sculpted.

Ultimately, Southern Progress feels like the work of a band whose ambitions outpace their understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses—caught between the pull of vast ambition and the demands of focused brevity. Structurally, much of the album sounds like what you’d get if you hacked a random four-minute section out of a fifteen-minute Between the Buried and Me epic and tried to pass it off as a self-contained statement. Instead of embarking on a glorious journey across ten different dimensions of bedlam, you’re handed fractured, short-lived fragments of aimless indulgence. The ineffable eldritch opossum that defines the soul of Flummox can’t be contained within earthly constraints—it must either tame itself to speak the common tongue, or fully embrace its madness. But it can’t do both.

Recommended tracks: “Siren Shock”, “Executive Dysfunction”
You may also like: OMB, Schizoid Lloyd, öOoOoOoOoOo, Victory Over the Sun
Final verdict: 5.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: Needlejuice – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Flummox is:
– Alyson Blake Dellinger (vocals, guitar, bass)
– Chase McCutcheon (guitar)
– Max Mobarry (guitars, vocals, fretless acoustic bass, keyboards, midi programming, percussion, trumpet, sound design, scoring, editing and production)
– Jesse Peck (keyboards)
– Alan Pfeifer (drums)
With guests:
– Jo Cleary (violin)
– Melody Ryan (flute)
– Braxton Nicholas (tenor saxophone)
– Eric McMyermick (accordion)
– Angela Lese (flute)

The post Review: Flummox – Southern Progress appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Album art by Bruno Gonzalez

Style: Blackgaze, post-metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Deafheaven, Alcest, Saon, Lantlôs, Agalloch
Country: Austria
Release date: 24 January 2025

Since 2011, Harakiri for the Sky have made themselves a notable presence in the metal scene—not a headliner band nor a forgettable opener. Their sound defines an accessible fusion of the deeply layered and atmospheric aspects of post-metal, with a sprinkling of melody infused black metal. All of this crystallizes into melancholic journeys through somber, aural landscapes.

Everything about the creation of Scorched Earth set the stage for a massive return to form. The band’s 2018 album Arson was followed by a series of middling, unremarkable albums. When their 2021 release, Mære, left both me and critics cold, it was clear that Harakiri for the Sky needed a new creative spark. This inspiration took root in the hiatus that occurred from 2021 to 2025, which involved J.J. (Michael V. Wahntraum) going on a personal pilgrimage of self-discovery; he was processing the end of a long-time relationship, which led him to a family-owned cabin far off in the woods, where he could find himself in solitude. Simultaneously, civilization itself was in the middle of the COVID pandemic, which added a world-weary angle to J.J.’s contemplations.

Harakiri for the Sky are masters of painting a gloomy vista: the use of emotive, if somewhat predictable harmony, layered vastness with piercing high melodies and ostinatos, and a strong sense of when to break from a momentous riff. Whether it’s a rainy day, a break up, or sense of existential unease, their sound functions as the backdrop to them all. The issue is, can they make a collection of songs that offers more than just a vibe—an album worth keeping?

The potential of being a keeper is present in Scorched Earth, manifested particularly in “With Autumn I’ll Surrender”. It is structured around a catchy motif which glides over the blackgaze/post-metal landscapes constructed by the rhythmic escalations of the harmonic beauty—starting slow, then reaching a gallop. Across the song’s eight minutes, this motif is built up, deviated from, and reintroduced in ways that keep the idea fresh and impactful. The issue, however, is that none of the other tracks measure up to it.

The band can’t escape the trap of songs having a convincing aesthetic but a vanishing trace of substance. This might not be apparent on a moment-to-moment basis, but the album’s overall songwriting leaves much to be desired. The beginning theme of “Heal Me,” consisting of a post-rock-esque soaring melody, becomes indistinct by drawing itself out and consisting mainly of tremolo-picked long notes—in this case, if the theme had more substantial variations that introduce a busier texture beyond tremolo picking, it might have been a keeper. “Keep Me Longing” has a theme containing a series of arpeggios, but its use in the song could easily be mistaken for some kind of secondary section, as it just doesn’t seem to have much of an identity. Although this theme is busy, it lacks contrast. Contours and textures that aren’t arpeggio-like would have gone far in making the motif more unique, and perhaps a more engaged rhythm section would have made the overall songwriting stronger. But a lack of diversity and memorability plague nearly the entire album.

In an ideal world, every song would be equally distinct, based firmly on ideas that compelled a relisten. Instead of lamenting its failures, I would suggest that the band look to the highlights of The Ruins of Beverast and Absu to develop a bit more sophistication in their composition in order to push themselves further. However, such a hope for Harakiri Of The Sky is a pipe dream, since they consistently fail to make songs that stand out from one another at all. Scorched Earth is a beautiful, but ultimately forgettable album. The only possible way forward from here is to take cues from the likes of Agalloch and Alcest in terms of motif-work.

Recommended tracks: With Autumn I’ll Surrender
You may also like: Together to the Stars, Constellatia, Asunojokei
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page

Label: AOP – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Harakiri for the Sky is:
– J.J. (vocals)
– M.S. (guitar, bass, producer)
– Krimh (drums)

The post Review: Harakiri for the Sky – Scorched Earth appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Album art by Dan Schaub

Style: Mixed Vocals (mostly clean)
Recommended for fans of: Dance Gavin Dance, Royal Coda, Maroon 5, Coheed and Cambria
Country: Utah, United States
Release date: 17 January 2025

Your friend is a prodigy at Harvard University: He has a perfect GPA, is the leader of the school debate team, and is one of the most productive research assistants at the institution. With a lightning quick mind that quickly answers every question the professor asks, your friend has a destiny to accomplish something great in the world.

He’s not without his weaknesses though: You take him to a frat party on a dare, and things don’t go smoothly. At some point, humorous discussions about football are met with stilted silence from him. At another point, he got the idea that pickup lines were cool, and completely made an ass of himself to some poor woman. A deeply one-sided conversation about the theoretical limits of quantum physics happened, which was met with people distracting themselves with memes on their phones. Eventually, he just leaves the party, and you kind of regret bringing him in the first place. This unfortunate analogy describes Mend, and Eidola’s journey to it.

A worthy contemporary to the likes of Dance Gavin Dance, Royal Coda, and Hail the Sun, Andrew Wells and his crew are a serious force in the Swancore scene, which is a particular strain of progressive post-hardcore. Their progressive qualities are exemplified by songs like “Contra: Second Temple” off of Degeneraterra, or “Caustic Prayer” off of The Architect, which are brimming with lush colors, busy and dense riffing, Andrew Well’s anthemic and lyrical voice, and songwriting that defies convention by strongly deviating from chorus driven structures. With an incredibly strong series of albums starting at their sophomore release, Eidola have proven themselves as a talented and consistent band with a definitive sound, and are now setting out to try something new.

Mend is a part of a duology which seeks to explore territory beyond the band’s definitive progressive trademarks. The first album in the duo, Eviscerate, incorporated aggressive metalcore influences in order to better describe the darker side of human nature. Mend, on the other hand, is an exploration of the light side of human nature, drawing from both rock sensibilities and straight-up pop music. Given that their sound is already quite bright, this is the only way they could push their sound forward towards something even more luminous.

All the components of a good album are here: vocal harmonies, sensual melodic lines, a stronger push towards a verse-chorus-verse structure, a variegated sonic palette, and a sprinkling of harsh vocals. Mend’s potential is exemplified in both “The Faustian Spirit” and “Godhead: Final Temple”. The former starts with a few sensual guitar lines, before moving into a build that is brimming with ideas: beginning low key and slightly stationary, and gaining intensity with Andrew’s cries and an almost total sense of evolution. Then the chorus hits, and it could rock a stadium with the resolution of the tension built before. “The Faustian Spirit” then demonstrates its sophistication by not merely reiterating the verses, but approaching each repetition of the chorus with totally different ideas while still remaining coherent.

Unfortunately, these two songs are flukes; the songwriting for the vast majority of the tracks struggles with middling attempts at choruses, incompleteness, questionable endings, and the occasional embarrassment. “Empire of Light” is seriously marred by Andrew’s Adam Levin aping: Singing ‘I don’t give a fuck’ repeatedly doesn’t come off as sexy as he thinks it does. “Blood in the Water” labors through an awkwardness; the initial transition to the chorus feels like a complete after-thought, and while the chorus itself has a marvelous quality, each subsequent verse and reintroduction feels poorly thought out and confused. “Prodigy”’s entire problem is that its chorus has the intensity of something that should have been a verse leading to somewhere greater.

This was an experiment for Eidola: A delving into something more conventional while not selling out completely. The result ranges from listenable to totally confused, with a tiny sprinkling of greatness. If the band were to return to this kind of sound in the future, there would need to be a serious effort to know the line where pop goes from cool to cringe, a bigger emphasis on build ups and coherency, and a commitment to choruses that stand out in intensity.

Recommended tracks: The Faustian Spirit, Godhead: Final Temple
You may also like: Makari, Meliorist, Senna, Galleons
Final verdict: 5.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram |

Label: Blue Swan – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

band in question is:
– Andrew Michael Wells (vocals, guitar)
– Sergio Medina (bass, guitar)
– Matthew Hansen (drums)
– Stephan Hawkes (producer)

The post Review: Eidola – Mend appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Avant-Garde Metal, Dissonant Death Metal (Harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Deathspell Omega, Wormed, Warforged, demented Jazz Fusion
Country: Germany
Release date: 27 September 2024

Ingurgitating Oblivion is a band with a long, tumultuous history. Throughout the band’s course, they have changed their moniker once, altered their fundamental sound twice, and have gone through so many lineup changes that Florian Engelke is the only remaining original member of the band. It’s taken a long time for them to truly come into their own, with a good number of middling albums in their wake that didn’t quite touch greatness, but this album, with no fewer than six session musicians, can be aptly described as their greatest moment so far with Florian truly coming into his own.

Ontology of Naught presents you with long epics that divide pulverising, demented chaos with moments of dark, twisted serenity. The end product sounds quite a bit like a technical death metal take on Fas – Ite, maledicti, in ignem aeternum by Deathspell Omega, mixed with a bit of I: Voice by Warforged, and a healthy dose of the darker strains of jazz fusion with some occasional classical leanings. Dark Ambient aesthetics are also present, with a bit of spoken word elements sprinkled in. The style of harsh vocals Florian Engelke employs on the album is adjacent to that of Deathspell Omega’s, and it holds a candle up to their work.

Polarization defines Florian’s vision on Ontology of Naught. For instance, the guitar tone is an almost divisive choice; it’s as if the tone chosen was designed to sound as massive, incoherent, and noisy as possible. Ingurgitating Oblivion isn’t really going for a clear, distinct, and precise sound, but more of a jagged, abrasive wall-of-noise that completely overwhelms the listener. Beyond that, everything else feels mixed reasonably well: the drums feel well balanced and they don’t sit too far forward or behind things, and the same can be said for the vocals, which don’t overpower the riffs while still being powerful in their own right.

To make an album grappling with seriously unconventional forms and usages of dissonance, a variety of non-metal influences, and song lengths whose minimum starts at the ten minute mark is a deeply ambitious endeavor. However, what ultimately matters is whether or not what you are trying to do constitutes something that actually works—ambitions as lofty as these often fail at this step. The crux of what Florian is going for here is multifaceted, partly in how the chaos that is built into and granted reprieve from is justified, if the components of the chaos have enough of a diverse vocabulary in their insanity to not become monotonous or indistinct, and if they are balanced with more memorable motifs. Another important aspect is if the softer styles that contrast with the chaos are properly executed in a way that doesn’t feel cheap or amateur, and if the whole epic flows in a way that doesn’t feel completely incoherent or weak.

Florian takes a lot of risks in Ontology of Naught, and some of them do pay off. “Uncreation’s Whirring Loom You Ply With Crippled Fingers” is a great example, starting with an eerie ambience which introduces a simple motif that is expanded upon and returned to in the ensuing chaos. In “To Weave The Tapestry of Nought”, a great example of breakdown and buildup is shown at the midway point: A delirious gloom of vaguely jazzy harmonies swirl around a spoken word passage, which is followed by intricate rhythms below a choral accompaniment with a simple, soaring lead that serves as a bit of a motif. A solo builds before metal cacophony erupts and the solo explodes into almost atonal convulsions, after which the metal becomes much more brutal and rhythmic, like a machine gun being fired at your face.

Ontology of Naught is not without flaws and failed attempts, however. One of my biggest gripes with the album is its usage of spoken word elements, which while not inherently bad, are notoriously difficult to get right. Classic examples would be in death metal à la Carcass, who uses them to paint a gory scene, or Deathspell Omega, who employed them to great effect, staging them as if they were some kind of demonic, biblical sermon. On Ontology of Naught, however, the narration teeters on the precipice of pretension. Florian wants to evoke a sense of radical rebellion in these elements, as if you were listening to the ideologues that served as the vanguard of a revolution, but the effect isn’t quite as profound as he believes it to be.

In addition, there are questionable decisions in terms of flow at times. “The Blossoms of Your Tomorrow Shall Unfold in My Heart” is the biggest offender of this, with the track jumping into chaos that doesn’t really follow any intuitive sense, and then abruptly cuts to Florian’s take on jazz fusion. Following that is more chaos, which isn’t balanced by any motif nor coherently differentiated by other distinctions, as well as an attempt at choral intrigue followed by an ambient outro, none of which really work as a whole song.

Ontology of Naught is ultimately a noteworthy addition to the dissonant death metal genre. Questionable aesthetic and design choices do hold the album back to an extent, with a production job that is divisive, though not objectively bad. However, Florian manages to take on the difficult mantle of making unbridled bedlam into something memorable and distinct, and succeeds to a very commendable degree, with each epic balanced by their own unique aspects in both the extreme and the tranquil.

Recommended tracks: Uncreation’s Whirring Loom You Ply With Crippled Fingers, The Barren Earth Oozes Blood, and Shakes and Moans, to Drink Her Children’s Gore
You may also like: Ceremony of Silence, Mitochondrion, Acausal Intrusion, Defacement
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page

Label: Willowtip – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Ingurgitating Oblivion is:
– Florian Engelke (guitars, vocals)
– Norbert Müller (guitars)
– Lille Gruber (session drums)
– Chris Zoukas (session bass)

The post Missed Album Review: Ingurgitating Oblivion – Ontology of Nought appeared first on The Progressive Subway.