Metal

Judge & Jury Records · 2 October 2026

Ten tracks and 35:24, and not one of them gets past four minutes. The longest is “Black Clouds Over Georgia” at exactly 4:00 and the shortest “Songbird” (3:12); the other eight sit between 3:13 and 3:47. It is the Los Angeles band’s first record without Carla Harvey, who had shared the microphone with Heidi Shepherd since the beginning and who left in 2024.

Shepherd is out front alone now, with Henry Flury on guitar, Ricky Bonazza on bass and Dave Nickles on drums, and most of the production is by Howard Benson, who comes by way of My Chemical Romance, Halestorm and Motörhead. The scream is still here, but it arrives as underlining: “Blame It On The Wind” (3:13) sets the record’s intensity ceiling and “Sincerity” (3:33) stakes the most on clean singing. “Black Clouds Over Georgia” heads for country and “Fever In My Neck” (3:39) for nu-metal.

“A couple of years ago I found myself in a web of darkness I couldn’t shake off,” Shepherd said when the album was announced, describing a “vicious cycle of self-loathing and doubt” while the people around her kept reminding her who she was. Five of the ten tracks already had videos before release day: “Lost In Your Touch”, “Sincerity”, “Blame It On The Wind”, “Black Dove” and “Leaving California”.

Half the album out in advance and ten songs cut to the same length make the whole thing play like a run of singles, and there are two places where the bet backfires. One is the thin synth on “Are You Waiting Up?” (3:47), which sits awkwardly against the weight of guitar underneath it. The other is “Black Dove” (3:23), the closer, where Shepherd goes for a sustained guttural the record asks of her nowhere else, left exposed with no second voice over the top.

The previous record was the double “Eye For An Eye… / …’Til The World’s Blind”, from 2023. No European dates have been announced.

Rating: 6.5/10

Text by Roger Estivill