Metal
Sound Frequency Ritual · 23 October 2026
“Manifested” is where Ascension Rock stakes its claim: two movements chained together, from psychedelic meditation into frontal doom, and the longest of the six tracks. Around it are five more pieces by the Seattle trio, and the end is “Billionaires”, which drops the wormholes and interdimensional entities of the concept to talk about oligarchy.
The gear list is more forthcoming than the concept. Erin Gravina plays in A standard tuning through two guitar rigs at once, routed via a Fuzzlords Dark Master and a Boss Blues Driver, and Daniel McManus’s bass runs through an Orange AD200 MK III head with a double cabinet.
Dylan Wall recorded, mixed and mastered all of it at 7Hills Studio in Seattle, and the band take the production credit. It is their third album in three years, after Pagan Ground (2024) and Tornit (2025), and the last two have gone through the same studio and the same engineer. The physical edition is three objects: lime-green vinyl with yellow and blue splatter, a CD in a three-panel digipak and a neon-green cassette.
The division of labour, though, isn’t a trio’s: Gravina is credited with the music, the lyrics, the guitar, the vocals and the cover art, while McManus and Bryce Hebner appear with their instruments and nothing else, bass and drums. The note says that “the manifestations appear during the sound frequency ritual”. A record presented as a collective ritual has the credits of one author with two accompanists.
And the running order isn’t the same depending on where you buy it. On the band’s Bandcamp page, “Usurper” is second and “Star and Stone” fourth; in the digital shops, “Star and Stone” is second and “Usurper” fourth. The six titles and the six durations match and “Manifested” sits in the middle either way, so the only thing that changes is which of the two tracks you reach “Manifested” through. Nowhere is it stated which of the two sequences the band wanted.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Roger Estivill