Post-rockMetal
Ripcord Records · 2 October 2026
Five tracks, thirty-six minutes forty-four, split as unevenly as a split can be: four pieces from Ogives Big Band across nineteen and a half minutes, and one from POHL that takes seventeen nineteen on its own. Ripcord Records put it out on 2 October, which isn’t the usual home for either band — POHL released “Freakspeed” (2020) and “Mysteries” (2024) on Wrong Speed.
The Ogives half runs from “I’m Glad You Exist”, three and a half minutes of big riff and instant hook issued as a single on 2 September, to “The Patron Saint of Lost Causes”, which slows to a five-minute-eleven sludge trudge. “Dragging The Plates” folds metal into dislocated hardcore and math rock, and “Read Us The Book of The Names of The Dead”, the longest of the four at six twenty-six, puts everything in at once: melodies that surface and get cut off, beatdowns, jazz detours. They come off “Boisterous Love” (2024) and the live “Boisterous Live & Other Animals” (2025).
POHL’s side is one piece, “Flayed Lord Prayer”, which opens on thunder and drone and spends several minutes keeping its cards down. When it shows them there’s a 5/4 riff and Will Pearce’s voice, and halfway through a saxophone solo arrives with no warning at all. It works because the track has no interest in being contained.
What doesn’t quite happen is the two bands meeting. Ogives work by piling up short tracks and sharp turns; POHL by piling up inside a single one. They share the volume and the refusal to sit in any one genre, and not much else: this is two bands’ EPs posted in the same envelope, and anyone who wants the record will have to want both halves separately.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre