Metal

RidingEasy Records · 18 September 2026

“The Prowler”, four oh six, is the shortest song on the record and the one you least expect to find there. A banjo comes in on the second verse, and what it does to the saturated guitars is scratch at them: the instrument stays inside the groove instead of replacing it, and the track never slackens its pace.

The banjo is played by Toshi Kasai, who produced and mixed the album. He also puts keys on “When Light Fades”, six thirty, a theremin gliding over the riff of “Her Wicked Spells”, six minutes flat, and backing vocals on “Thy Eternal Grief”, six eighteen, which is where the quintet steps into epic doom for the first time. The band have said this was the first time they had worked with a producer who gave them input on the music, and that they had thought the songs were already finished.

The rest is classic-rooted doom played at a tempo that isn’t. The title track, four forty-seven, starts with no preamble and a chorus about dark forces calling out the singer’s name; “Inquisition”, six oh three, drops to a quarter-note pulse with both guitars palm-muted, releasing the pressure only in swells of open strings; “Ashes Of The Damned”, seven forty-four, closes the record held up by Elix Feliciano’s bass.

The three new colours that separate this album from “A Sinner’s Past” — banjo, theremin, keys — are all brought by the producer, and each appears on exactly one track. What the five in the band have widened is their willingness to let somebody walk into the studio with instruments they don’t play; Eddie Andrade and Oscar Hernandez’s guitars do what they did two years ago.

It was cut between Cyan Sound Studio and Sound of Sirens, Brad Boatright mastered it, and the cover is a painting by Mariusz Lewandowski, the Polish artist behind Bell Witch’s “Mirror Reaper”, who died on 15 July 2022. It is the band’s third full-length and the third RidingEasy has released for them.

Rating: 7.5/10

Text by Roger Estivill