Metal
Church Road Records · 28 August 2026
The album ends with a minute and eight seconds of approaching water. “Our Last Walk” has no riff and no voice: it is the sound of a current building, and then, just as it seems about to arrive somewhere, it is cut off dead and the silence is left standing. It is the riskiest production decision on “Choosing To Die” and also the one that best sums up what Kulk do.
There are two of them: Thom, who sings and plays guitar, and Jade on drums. Twenty-six minutes, nine tracks, and a thick sludge tone with doom’s slowness and enough percussion to keep it from bogging down. “An Endless Knife” opens in two minutes thirty-five with very busy drumming under a guitar that rarely changes chord, and “Collapse” (2:50) draws melody out of a low tuning and a feedback pitch used as resonance.
The second half is where the duo moves. “The Saddest Holiday” (3:15) carries the album’s hardest riff and then a passage of clean singing and odd calm that resembles nothing else here. “Ache” is the longest track at five minutes fifteen, and it ends with a violin deliberately out of tune against the prevailing key.
The limitation is that the record saves its best for the end. The first four tracks are ten and a half minutes in one gear, with the same guitar density and the same vocal attack, and anyone who stops before “The Saddest Holiday” will come away thinking this is a far flatter album than it is.
Church Road Records, 28 August 2026. Nine tracks, 26 minutes.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Roger Estivill