The Flenser HHV Records 60 Items

The music of San Jose-based artist Kathryn Mohr exists in a liminal space of auditory dissociation. Drawing inspiration from lost items washing up on the shore of the San Francisco Bay, Mohr’s art chases the ephemeral nature of humanity, the warping of memory, and how trauma changes one’s experience of this world.

Her new album Waiting Room—out January 24 on The Flenser—was written and self-recorded over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, within the walls of a disused fish factory surrounded by remote nature. Mohr spent hours immersed in the writing and recording of this album in a windowless concrete room lit with a string of multicolored light bulbs (which made their way into the album art), taking breaks to wander the factory or disappear up the shoreline—field recorder in hand. What came out of those recording hours are songs inspired by horror as extravagant as limb amputation by a faulty elevator and lyrics as maze-like and misguided as the torturous love and fears they depict.

During this period of isolation in the tiny fishing village of Stöðvarfjörður, Mohr was all too aware of a feeling of waiting, attuned to all the worm-like emotions and memories that crawl out of the ground when there is nothing and no one to distract. She spent most time in the factory, which had sat derelict for a decade, and was in the process of being repurposed into a space for artists, with many parts left untouched since the last days of fish production and other rooms made new with heat and light. This state of incompleteness, of loss of meaning, and repurposing became a mirror of her inner world, her abandoned ideas of home, love, affection, and meaning dissolved by traumatic memories of violence. Waiting Room is a processing of nearly untouchable emotions—of rebuilding the foundation for which elusive words like affection, passion and home can have a meaning weatherproof to and detangled from the direct, physical and emotional violence that permeates our experiences on earth.

In 2008, Have A Nice Life released their now cult classic Deathconsciousness LP to a whimper and critical non-interest. Six years after its release the band followed up with 2014's stunner The Unnatural World, Deathconsciousness has become a force of influence and fanatic obsession. Seamlessly blending, with unparalleled depth and weight, shoegaze, post punk, new wave, industrial and noise. The album was originally released by Enemies List Home Recordings founded by HANL members Dan and Tim. The album has since floated in and out of production, with the last instantly out of print vinyl pressing occurring in 2009. Now, longtime HANL collaborator The Flenser will re-issue Deathconsciousness with deluxe packaging, including a lengthy accompanying zine. Have A Nice Life commented, “Working with Flenser lets us keep things comfortable on our end, while also pressing enough copies to actually meet the need and not creating an artificially-inflated collector’s market, as happened with some of our past releases.”


The Flenser's reissue of Deathconsciousness will be accompanied by a 75-page booklet detailing the dark and forgotten history of the Antiochean cult. Blurring the lines between novella, liner notes, and academic text, the zine itself presents an engrossing narrative. The album is rhythmic, primal and expansive and is a gloomy-post-punk masterpiece; a mediation on death, loss and unrequited love. Deathconsciousness feels more fresh and engaging with every listen and has held up as a remarkable piece of art. Fans of Have A Nice Life exhibit both cultic thought and action for good reason. It is perhaps a fanbase as dark and mysterious as the Antiochean’s, the album itself revolves around. Now The Flenser is honored to rerelease Deathconsciousness a gorgeous and disarming contribution to the modern lexicon for a larger audience.

Limited edition of 150 copies only available at HHV in opaque grey vinyl.

For years, fans of Connecticut’s post-industrial doomgaze two-piece Have a Nice Life have restlessly awaited the band’s second gloom-fueled, autobiographical meditation. Now, San Francisco label The Flenser is proud to unleash The Unnatural World. With eight songs clocking in at 47 minutes, The Unnatural World is Have a Nice Life’s most monumental release yet—a colossal, perfectly orchestrated work that leaves listeners comatose on the ground beside their record players. This second full-length delivers doom and gloom at a new level, more focused and soul-tearing than ever. The weight of sound is matched only by the band’s piercingly uncomfortable and personal lyrics, dredging up themes of modern legend, religious insecurity and crushing depression. Wave after overwhelming wave will slam listeners down into psychological depths of existentialism and woe. Like its predecessor, the band’s 2008 debut Deathconsciousness, The Unnatural World maintains intensity from quiet lows to staggering highs. No speaker will do it justice, and none of you are worthy!

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept.

Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks.

Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

This colorway is limited to 150 copies and only available at HHV.

With the broader adoption of the internet around the turn of the century, how people would engage with and discover underground music would change forever. As a result of the new digital era, DIY was now worldwide, and no band embraced this new frontier better than Have A Nice Life. Formed in 2000 by duo Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, the Middletown, CT-based pair would, throughout the 00s, self-release and share a number of demos and home recordings via early social media channels as well as establish its in-house label Enemies List Home Recordings. These first steps set in motion Have A Nice Life’s rise to renown as an icon of underground music in the internet age, culminating with the release of its pivotal 2008 debut album, Deathconsciousness. Through word of mouth and online discussion, Deathconsciousness became subject to viral praise thanks to its synthesis of bleak post-punk, lo-fi shoegaze, and carpets of hypnotic drone music. Eventually, this humble self-released project would attain the status of a post-internet cult classic, amassing Have A Nice Life a fervent online following that the band would interact with in kind.

In an effort to thank and continue to engage with Have A Nice Life’s internet cult following, Barrett and Macuga would regularly share links to old demos, works in progress, and outtakes from the recording of Deathconsciousness. Over time, a group of fans would compile these demos into an unofficial release. Dubbed Voids, this fan-made compilation several alternate takes of tracks from Deathconsciousness, as well as a handful of early versions of songs that would appear on Have A Nice Life’s two following albums, The Unnatural World and Sea of Worry. While undeniably reminiscent of their final album version counterparts, the earlier versions of these tracks each feel distinct in a way that makes the moody, decidedly lo-fi aura of Voids an essential slice of the Have A Nice Life discography. Hungry for more from the enigmatic duo, fans swarmed around this compilation, accompanied by loud calls for it to receive a physical release. Seeing that demand and with the band’s blessing, a pair of fan-made tape pressings of Voids would be released via Music Ruins Lives, a DIY label run by Have A Nice Life superfan Thom Wasluck, also known for his band Planning for Burial. Between both instances of the tape swiftly selling out and the compilation’s long absence from streaming services, Voids has historically been an elusive release to track down, only available in the obscurest corners of the internet or physically on the secondary market at eye-wateringly high prices. Over a decade since its initial, unofficial release in 2011, The Flenser is proud to reissue Have A Nice Life’s Voids for the first time ever in an official capacity in physical form. Originally released digitally in early 2023 and freshly remastered for the occasion, this reissue of the beloved compilation will receive its first-ever wide release on physical formats (CD/LP/Cassette). This release also marks the first time fan-favorite tracks from Voids “Sisyphus”, “I’m Doctor House”, and “Human Error” will be available on vinyl and CD. Like a symbolic passing of the torch, the physical versions of the 2023 Voids reissue come with a foreword essay written by Wasluck, the previous custodian of Voids during the Music Ruins Lives days.

The music of San Jose-based artist Kathryn Mohr exists in a liminal space of auditory dissociation. Drawing inspiration from lost items washing up on the shore of the San Francisco Bay, Mohr’s art chases the ephemeral nature of humanity, the warping of memory, and how trauma changes one’s experience of this world.

Her new album Waiting Room—out January 24 on The Flenser—was written and self-recorded over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, within the walls of a disused fish factory surrounded by remote nature. Mohr spent hours immersed in the writing and recording of this album in a windowless concrete room lit with a string of multicolored light bulbs (which made their way into the album art), taking breaks to wander the factory or disappear up the shoreline—field recorder in hand. What came out of those recording hours are songs inspired by horror as extravagant as limb amputation by a faulty elevator and lyrics as maze-like and misguided as the torturous love and fears they depict.

During this period of isolation in the tiny fishing village of Stöðvarfjörður, Mohr was all too aware of a feeling of waiting, attuned to all the worm-like emotions and memories that crawl out of the ground when there is nothing and no one to distract. She spent most time in the factory, which had sat derelict for a decade, and was in the process of being repurposed into a space for artists, with many parts left untouched since the last days of fish production and other rooms made new with heat and light. This state of incompleteness, of loss of meaning, and repurposing became a mirror of her inner world, her abandoned ideas of home, love, affection, and meaning dissolved by traumatic memories of violence. Waiting Room is a processing of nearly untouchable emotions—of rebuilding the foundation for which elusive words like affection, passion and home can have a meaning weatherproof to and detangled from the direct, physical and emotional violence that permeates our experiences on earth.

As Midwife, Denver based multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston plays what she describes as “Heaven Metal,” or emotive music about devastation. Johnston began developing the experimental pop project in 2015 while a resident of beloved Denver DIY space Rhinoceropolis. The venue/co-op started in the early aughts and nurtured local artists until 2016, when its doors were shuttered due to high tensions surrounding the safety of DIY spaces (not coincidentally following the horrific Ghost Ship fire in Oakland). Residents were displaced around Denver and artists like Midwife were forced to start over.

However, it was at Rhinoceropolis that Madeline became close with Colin Ward, an artistic confidant and friend to whom her new album, Forever, is dedicated. Madeline comments, “He was my roommate and was the embodiment of that place [Rhinoceropolis] in a lot of ways. We became really close friends there. I was always learning so much from him, about life and being an artist. He was an amazing teacher and friend to me.” When Ward passed away unexpectedly in 2018, she turned towards sound to express the indescribable feelings that partnered with her grief.

These mournful sounds ultimately developed into her new album, Forever. The 6-song LP is a latticework of soft focus guitars and precise melodies– anthems of light piercing through gray clouds of drone. On the track “C.R.F.W.,” we hear Colin Ward reading a poem that speaks of a leaf falling from a tree in autumn: “imagine the way a breeze feels against your leaf body while you finally don’t have to hold on anymore.” Johnston responds with slowly radiating tones, branches stretching out to hold the leaf one last time. “I wanted to write him a letter. I wanted to make something for him in his memory,” Madeline says of Forever.

On Forever, Midwife combines ambient and dream pop into nuanced, reverb-soaked music that is equally haunting and moving

“If rock ’n’ roll’s a dream, please don’t wake me.”

Midwife’s No Depression In Heaven, her fourth studio album, was written primarily in the back of vans while on tour endlessly over the course of the past few years. The record engages with the contemplative spirit of rock ’n’ roll from within a body in motion.

No Depression In Heaven explores themes of sentimentality, the interplay between dreams, memory, and fantasy, and a familiar subject seen throughout all of Midwife’s work: grief. Madeline Johnston takes a look at the tender and transcendent underneath a hard exterior of leather and studs, exposing a different side of the heavy music scene, where Johnston’s project has been living and evolving.

Recording at home in New Mexico between 2021 and 2023, Johnston aimed to create something that was rough around the edges, returning to a free recording process that was less focused on perfection and more attuned to expressing the spirit that lives inside of the songs. The album features collaborations with Chris Adolf and Michael Stein of American Culture, Ben Schurr and Tim Jordan of Nyxy Nyx, Angel Diaz of Vyva Melinkolya, and Allison Lorenzen.

Inspired by ephemeral moments that make up life on tour, the totemization of vehicles, outlaws, and the psyche of America’s underbelly, No Depression In Heaven affirms Johnston’s existential status as a woman of the highway.

Released only a handful of months following the band’s breakthrough debut EP, Remove Your Skin Please signaled that whatever Chat Pile was doing wasn't just a one-off novelty of Midwest metal nihilism. While the band’s foundational sound of caustic and cacophonous noise rock crystallized with its debut, the release of Remove Your Skin Please signposted the vast extent to which Chat Pile could stylistically tinker and conceptually iterate atop it. Heard in the gothy post-punk dirge of “Mask” and the dissonant extreme metal fervor of “Davis'', the more experimental ideas present on Remove Your Skin Please come off less like a selection of the band’s conceptual prototypes and more like fully realized reflections of its member's own tastes and preferences. That doesn’t mean Chat Pile’s noise rock foundation is diluted in the slightest as EP bookends “Dallas Beltway” and “Garbage Man” push its twisted take on the genre to new aural extremes in its instrumentation and subject matter spanning grisly serial murders to the slow festering death of the environment at the hands of mankind. For as ugly and unhinged as Chat Pile’s tales of 21st-century American dread are, Remove Your Skin Please asserts something that is somehow subtly even more terrifying: If a quartet of otherwise ordinary Okies can convey such apocalyptically bleak yet resonate messages in its music, that may mean we feel that same nihilism, too.

“Wretched Humanity, the fault is yours.” Giles Corey is the gloomy, stripped-down solo project of Dan Barrett, one of the masterminds behind the cult act Have A Nice Life. Dealing with issues like suicide, depression, and the paranormal, Giles Corey is both incredibly bleak and intimate. Two years after the project’s self-titled debut, Barrett recorded three minimalist tracks before a series of live performances, releasing them as Hinterkaifeck. Hinterkaifeck was released in February 2013 by Enemies List Home Recordings, and has existed exclusively as a digital release until now. The title is a reference to a gruesome and mysterious mass murder that took place on a remote farm in 1922 near Munich, Germany. The Flenser presents Giles Corey’s Hinterkaifeck as a one-sided 12-inch record with a special etching on the b-side. “Giles Corey’s Hinterkaifeck is a testament to his ability to wield emotion with his ambience and subtlety.” —Sputnikmusic

Have A Nice LIFE’s second gloom-fueled, autobiographical meditation. With eight songs clocking in at 47 minutes, The Unnatural World is Have a Nice Life’s most monumental release yet—a colossal, perfectly orchestrated work that leaves listeners comatose on the ground beside their record players. This second full-length delivers doom and gloom at a new level, more focused and soul-tearing than ever.

Dan Barrett—the man behind Have A Nice Life, Giles Corey, and Enemies List Home Recordings—has unveiled his sophomore album as the electronic project Black Wing on The Flenser. No Moon is a gorgeous chillwave / post-punk record with nine bleak yet blissful songs and is a fitting close out to the year 2020. Written over the course of the last few years, with about half of the songs penned over the last six months (mostly due to pandemic “free time”), No Moon is a heart-wrenchingly honest outpour of emotion. Throughout the writing process, Barrett was having recurring dreams and felt a strange sense of timelessness—that, combined with quarantine is what he simply describes as “a weird experience.” Barrett explains, “Quarantine was profoundly isolating. With writing this record, more than anything I just wanted to prove to myself that I could make something out of it. That ended up being a lot of songs about feeling isolated, a lot of ‘trapped in my own head’ moments. I think that was a lot of people’s experience as well.” Barrett formed Black Wing in the mid-2010s as an opposite to his project Giles Corey; where Giles started as “only acoustic instruments allowed,” Black Wing started with only digital instruments. In 2015, Black Wing released its first proper full length, …Is Doomed, to great critical acclaim. Much like that album, No Moon bubbles with electronica and indie-pop with earworm melodies and affecting lyrics. But No Moon is a transitional change from Black Wing’s debut; the songs here are a bit more experimental and there’s a significantly wider emotional range to them. The lyrics are haunting and personal and resonate deeply with the listener. The nine new tracks on No Moon are gloomy yet glorious, heavy while ambient, overwhelming yet alluring, and offer an earnest and honest look into one’s self during such a troubling and confusing year—something everyone can relate to.

“‘Some time in the Spring of 2009, I tried to kill myself. Six months before that, I used a Voor’s Head Device for the first time.’ This line opens the 150-page book that accompanies Giles Corey, an intensely personal, intimate portrait of depression that took me almost four years to make.” —Dan Barrett


Giles Corey’s haunting self-titled debut is back in print! The Flenser is pleased to offer a new version of this cult favorite as a double LP housed in a gatefold jacket, with the same 150-page book that accompanied the previous versions.

Giles Corey is the gloomy folk-driven solo project from Have A Nice Life mastermind Dan Barrett. Here, Barrett forgoes the post-industrial trappings of Have A Nice Life in favor of an intimate singer-songwriter approach. While thematically related to his other work—dealing with subjects like suicide, death and the paranormal—Giles Corey feels more personal, with impressive shifts from quiet desperation to cathartic outburst. Over the years the album has gained a fervent following, and has sometimes been compared to a religious experience. It is dark yet purgative enterprise not for the frail of heart.

The accompanying book is an integral part of the album. Its examinations of the life and times of cult leader Robert Voor parallel the themes within the lyrics and offer further immersion for the reflective listener. In Barrett’s own words: “The album follows a story arc of emotions that are detailed in the accompanying book, as much a part of this record as the music. The text switches between personal tales of struggles with depression, suicide, and a feeling of being lost, and the story of cult-leader and afterlife theorist Robert Voor. Voor’s writings on death and the afterlife feature prominently across Have A Nice Life’s Deathconsciousness, Nahvalr’s self-titled debut, and Giles Corey, making him the unifying factor behind most of the music I’ve written in the last ten years. This record is as personal and raw as anything I’ve ever done.”

Mamaleek seeks to weaponize the tropes of blues, jazz and black metal through an understanding of their respective formal structures. Known for flouting genre conventions, the band’s newest album Come & See, marks yet another degree of separation from their black metal roots. Here Mamaleek draws inspiration from post-war public housing—specifically Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green housing project—seeking to analyze the emotional impact of the spaces one occupies, the surreal forces behind the appearance of physical reality, and the residues they leave behind. This is the band’s third full-length album for The Flenser, and their first release written and recorded with a full band.

Founded in 2008 in the Bay Area by two anonymous brothers, Mamaleek has explored a vast sonic territory on the edge of a genre often renown for its aversion to change. Their expert utilization of left-field samples and unconventional instrumentation, and their insistent drive to experiment continues to set the band apart from their peers.

Nocebo, the first full-length by the Boston, Massachusetts five piece Elizabeth Colour Wheel, is inspired by anxiety, the fear and the desire of being constantly overwhelmed. The album came to fruition over the summer of 2018, when the band embraced a heavy “kill your idols” mindset, crafting an album that is distinctly schizophrenic yet familiar, touching on ’90s heavy rock, shoe-gaze, and black metal influences.

Mixed and mastered by Seth Manchester of Machines of Magnets (The Body, Street Sects), Nocebo is a five-walled haunted house, constructed from the wild, chantlike vocals of Lane Shi, the heavy, reverberant guitars of Emmett Palaima and Alice Jackson, the sludgy, distorted bass of Billy Cunningham, and the powerful, aggressive drumming of Connor Devito. Inside these walls frequencies of spectral anger echo and resound, gathering into thunderous waves, which crash against the borders of the room before dying out into eerie silence.

Utilizing frantic, uncompromising rhythms and a variety of nightmarish samples, Austin TX duo Street Sects have created a feverish marriage between industrial music and punk rock.

The music of San Jose-based artist Kathryn Mohr exists in a liminal space of auditory dissociation. Drawing inspiration from lost items washing up on the shore of the San Francisco Bay, Mohr’s art chases the ephemeral nature of humanity, the warping of memory, and how trauma changes one’s experience of this world.

Her new album Waiting Room—out January 24 on The Flenser—was written and self-recorded over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, within the walls of a disused fish factory surrounded by remote nature. Mohr spent hours immersed in the writing and recording of this album in a windowless concrete room lit with a string of multicolored light bulbs (which made their way into the album art), taking breaks to wander the factory or disappear up the shoreline—field recorder in hand. What came out of those recording hours are songs inspired by horror as extravagant as limb amputation by a faulty elevator and lyrics as maze-like and misguided as the torturous love and fears they depict.

During this period of isolation in the tiny fishing village of Stöðvarfjörður, Mohr was all too aware of a feeling of waiting, attuned to all the worm-like emotions and memories that crawl out of the ground when there is nothing and no one to distract. She spent most time in the factory, which had sat derelict for a decade, and was in the process of being repurposed into a space for artists, with many parts left untouched since the last days of fish production and other rooms made new with heat and light. This state of incompleteness, of loss of meaning, and repurposing became a mirror of her inner world, her abandoned ideas of home, love, affection, and meaning dissolved by traumatic memories of violence. Waiting Room is a processing of nearly untouchable emotions—of rebuilding the foundation for which elusive words like affection, passion and home can have a meaning weatherproof to and detangled from the direct, physical and emotional violence that permeates our experiences on earth.

Upon its release in 2017, Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper cemented the Seattle duo’s status as one of doom metal’s most formidable acts. Its single, monolithic track also served as a tribute to the band’s former drummer Adrian Guerra, who tragically passed away the year before. Five years earlier, on the back of a highly praised demo, the band released their debut album, Longing. Featuring the original line-up of Dylan Desmond and Adrian Guerra (rip), the album was recorded by Brandon Fitzsimons (Wormwood, Samothrace). It is a time-stretching journey through darkness, pain, and suffering, and doomed minimalism that is now considered a classic of the genre. Originally released on CD by Profound Lore in 2012 and on vinyl by The Flenser, the vinyl edition has been out of print for several years until now. The Flenser is proud to offer a new pressing of this timeless masterpiece. Longing is packaged in a thick, old-style case-wrapped gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves.

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks.

Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

Uboa’s fifth album Impossible Light almost never made it out of the dark. From its initial conception in 2018, this record went to hell and back, dragging its immensity and too-big-to-hold emotion through the torturous process of translation to sound and returned triumphantly as a full-bodied record in a distinct new style.

Impossible Light begins where Uboa’s 2019 breakout album The Origin Of My Depression left off—and ends somewhere entirely different. The Origin stunned with its methodical use of doom, harsh noise, and ambient soundscapes while documenting a raw, unhindered account of Xandra Metcalfe’s experiences with her transition and her struggles with mental health. Over time The Origin steadily grew a cult-like following which developed into a full-fledged internet community focused around noise, neurodiversity and transness. While Uboa’s signature style of highly polished, cinematic “hypernoise” is front and center in Impossible Light, there is also a daring departure into the genres of industrial metal / rock, setting it apart from any other Uboa release thus far and distinguishing it from other contemporary noise records.

Metcalfe kept the lyrical content of this record as a time capsule of the catastrophic ups and downs and rapidly changing environments within herself and in the world from 2018-2023. Key collaborators include Blood Of A Pomegranate, Otay:onii, Charlie Looker and Haela Hunt-Hendrix of Liturgy. Impossible Light dives fearlessly into queer sexuality, trans embodiment, grief for those who couldn’t make it, solidarity for those facing unimaginable discrimination, the toxic spread of transphobic hatred and misinformation, and the ultimate hope of recovery from trauma and mental anguish. This is a record about the light at the end of the tunnel and the power it takes to keep moving towards it.

“If rock ’n’ roll’s a dream, please don’t wake me.”

Midwife’s No Depression In Heaven, her fourth studio album, was written primarily in the back of vans while on tour endlessly over the course of the past few years. The record engages with the contemplative spirit of rock ’n’ roll from within a body in motion.

No Depression In Heaven explores themes of sentimentality, the interplay between dreams, memory, and fantasy, and a familiar subject seen throughout all of Midwife’s work: grief. Madeline Johnston takes a look at the tender and transcendent underneath a hard exterior of leather and studs, exposing a different side of the heavy music scene, where Johnston’s project has been living and evolving.

Recording at home in New Mexico between 2021 and 2023, Johnston aimed to create something that was rough around the edges, returning to a free recording process that was less focused on perfection and more attuned to expressing the spirit that lives inside of the songs. The album features collaborations with Chris Adolf and Michael Stein of American Culture, Ben Schurr and Tim Jordan of Nyxy Nyx, Angel Diaz of Vyva Melinkolya, and Allison Lorenzen.

Inspired by ephemeral moments that make up life on tour, the totemization of vehicles, outlaws, and the psyche of America’s underbelly, No Depression In Heaven affirms Johnston’s existential status as a woman of the highway.

Time is a slippery fish.

Loss has inspired Mamaleek’s latest full-length album, titled Vida Blue. This marks the San Francisco Bay Area metal deconstructionists’ eighth album and their third as a full lineup.

Tragedy struck in March of 2023 when the band lost a longtime friend and member, keyboardist Eric Livingston, leaving the group, which began as a duo of two brothers and later expanded to a five-piece, now with only four members. Despite this profound loss, Mamaleek persevered, performing as a quartet at various festivals, including the 2023 edition of Tilburg.

The band returned to the studio to create new material that appropriately reflects their journey through loss and honors their fallen comrade. The resulting album draws inspiration from the legacy of Oakland A’s baseball legend Vida Blue, whose former team coincidentally announced its relocation to Las Vegas that same year. The band members themselves describe this poignant chapter in their own words:

“Time is a slippery fish. Maybe only someone like Vida could grasp it. Although he’s left time behind, his image and that lefty heat remain in the memories of many. Eventually they’ll be forgotten, and hopefully replaced with even more exultant ones. This musical recording is a reflection on loss and its acceptance. We explore several examples for each song, including the loss of pride, of money, of glory, of country, of sanity, of a favorite sports team, of significant others, and, every day, one’s self. It also explores various associated moods—fear, panic, reverence, stoicism, and steadfastness—to arrive at a resolution: Loss is only a test, the glue that holds and erodes each memory, the connection that binds and loosens us all, pitch by pitch, inning by inning. This is your celebration.”

Vida Blue is a person, moment, and memory, together the crystallization of apocalypse: “unveiling,” “disclosure.”

In the summer of 2019, a newly formed, Oklahoma City-based rock band called Chat Pile would release its debut four-track EP, This Dungeon Earth. Little did anyone know at the time, but this initial taste of grotesque, confronting, and visceral noise rock courtesy of four slacker Okies would kick off the story of what would soon be one of the most widely lauded underground acts in years. Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, Chat Pile’s body of work is emblematic of a distinctly midwestern flavor of American dread, with This Dungeon Earth being no exception to the rule. While raw in presentation, Chat Pile’s debut EP comes across as anything but a rough draft. Much of the band’s hallmark traits, spanning the unhinged vocals of frontman Raygun Busch, the grotesquely contorted guitar riffage, and the industrial smack of heavily processed percussion, appear as far back as this earliest chapter. If anything, the raw, DIY-rooted origins of these uncompromising thirteen minutes of sludged-out carnage make This Dungeon Earth all the more impactful. Between its biting social commentary and gratuitous grindhouse insanity, the unfiltered brutality of Chat Pile’s debut recording has seen tracks like “Rainbow Meat”, “Face”, and “Ratboy” become mainstays in its notorious live shows. Although it depicts the band’s monstrous amalgamation of noise rock, sludge metal, hardcore, and more as it is just beginning to congeal, This Dungeon Earth comes off as the furthest thing from a simple intro and more of an essential first chapter in Chat Pile’s story.

Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz became close friends in 2020, regarding each other as a lifeline when things were difficult in their personal lives. This friendship was born from music but quickly became so much more than that. The two met in person in 2021, when Diaz came for a recording residency at Johnston’s studio in New Mexico. It was during this session that they wrote and recorded Orbweaving, in the heat of summer in the arid Chihuahuan Desert.

Orbweaving combines the best parts of Midwife’s “heaven metal” and Vyva Melinkolya’s sentimental, classic shoegaze in a way that distinctively elevates both artists. The record explores themes of hopelessness, calling on a higher power, being alone, and the sublime horror of the natural world. Orbweaving seeks to thematically and sonically create a web like structure—a gauze of sorrow and visceral connective thread.

At night, Diaz and Johnston went herping (a term used by herpetologists to describe looking for snakes and amphibians) along the empty roads near Las Cruces. The asphalt retains heat from the day, and the snakes absorb the warmth by writhing across the pavement.

They found rattlesnakes, roadkill, and orb-weaver spiders.

In 2017 The Flenser released a CD collection of material from Planning For Burial's early period entitled Matawan - Collected Works 2010-2014. Named after the bands long-term home-base in Matawan New Jersey, the collection included many of Planning For Burial's beloved rare tracks that originally appeared on seven inches, cassettes, or online. Since 2017, the band's own Thom Wasluck has re-examined the material found on the Matawan collection with the intention of releasing a vinyl version. This vinyl version of the second volume of the Matawan collection includes much of the first disc of the CD version tirelessly remixed and edited, and the inclusion tracks not found on the original edition specially prepared for the vinyl format.

Long requested vinyl edition of the Matawan collection. Compilation of rare and never before heard tracks from cult gloomgaze project. All songs remixed and specifically prepared for vinyl Mastered for this release by Nicholas Wilbur (Mount Eerie)

Midwife’s Madeline Johnston has gone through several different iterations of her music project. In 2015, she moved into Denver’s premier DIY space Rhinoceropolis, where she began learning recording on her own and primarily focusing on Sister Grotto, a long-form ambient based project. Working alongside artists like Colin Ward and Dani Rev, she was inspired by her roommate’s tenacity and artistic outpouring. Madeline recorded Born to Lose / Born to Leave, Blindside, and Song For An Unborn Sun during the first half of her residency (before she started the project that would soon become Like Author, Like Daughter).

Time is a major element in this group of recordings. Tracks were played in real time, slowed down, and played on top of, repeatedly, and has been referred to as an ambient sludge record. Components like the Casio Sk-1, endless loop cassettes, delay and pitch shifters distort the passage of time - Layers, repetition, and analogue delay fold it back in on itself.

Not unlike the sentimentality and difficulty distinguishing landmark moments of this time period for Madeline, the music itself is a sort of frenetic and meditative blur.

Some of the tracks on Song For An Unborn Sun were later re-worked for the first Midwife album. Most importantly, “Song For An Unborn Sun” and “Placeholder” which became the song “Way Out.”

Song For An Unborn Sun was originally released as a split in 2016 on the small run cassette label Terrible Pleasures. Side A was by Sister Grotto, and Side B was by Devin Shaffer (who at the time was releasing music under the name Yarrow).

The Flenser 2023 reissue will solely highlight the Sister Grotto material, remastered, along with previously unreleased songs that serve as a timestamp of that particularly magic creative era.

“Placeholder (Slide Edit)” is a postcard from Madeline Johnston and Tucker Theodore’s early collaboration. “Live at Wazee Union” is a recording of a guerrilla show in a former co-op art studio in the process of being demolished and replaced. It was presented and played with the help and additional instrumentation of Braeyden Jae and H Lite’s Anton Krueger. The group created a shrine with about 50 votive candles to set the scene: a temporary refuge from the growing pains of gentrification. “esp” is a play on Song For An Unborn Sun’s closing track, “Hex,” and was made using modified tape loops and field recordings from the industrial neighborhood where Rhinoceropolis once stood.

An early iteration of Madeline Johnston’s Midwife project.

This is the first time Sister Grotto’s Song for An Unborn Son will be released on vinyl

In 2019, Drowse’s Kyle Bates set out to produce a self-recorded new album. Marked by moving across state lines, long-distance relationships, and deaths in the family, the following years proved to be metamorphic. Now, three years later, he’s emerged with Wane Into It, continuing a distinctly Pacific Northwestern tradition of self-recording indie experimentalists (Grouper, The Microphones, Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You). One of the most impactful moments came during the looming passing of a family member. With death expected, the choice was made to conduct a bizarre “living-wake” gathering—with the soon-to-be-deceased in attendance. Shortly after, Bates found himself disturbed, preoccupied with the abstraction of memory. The experience led him to reassess the tool one uses to curate our selective memories: the internet. The internet, which creeped into even more aspects of life during the pandemic, serves as our self-made digital link to the past. Its uncaring presence layered over humbling thoughts of death and his own childhood memories of the Oregon Coast as he worked on Wane Into It; life’s hyperreal texture sank into the recordings as he felt his body age and wane. Big sounds were captured in bedrooms, hallways, practice spaces, forests, and on highways throughout West Coast—vibraphones chime over black metal guitars, a mellotron drones under degraded samples, violins splinter against granular field recordings. In the process of documenting these aural moments Bates completed an MFA at Mills College, coloring the album with shades of avant-electronic and minimalist composition (Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Sarah Davachi etc…). To realize this scope Drowse collaborated with Madeline Johnston (Midwife), Alex Kent (Sprain), Lula Asplund, a chamber ensemble and more. Bates’s songwriting and production have never been more lucid; sounds flicker as he sings with fragile intensity. The record, Drowse’s third for The Flenser, impressionistically distills loss, distance, mystery, prescription drugs, the preservation of memory via recording, and ambient anxiety through its titular act: to Wane Into It, to disappear awaiting the next moon phase, water returning to sea before reemerging as a wave.

In 2019, Drowse’s Kyle Bates set out to produce a self-recorded new album. Marked by moving across state lines, long-distance relationships, and deaths in the family, the following years proved to be metamorphic. Now, three years later, he’s emerged with Wane Into It, continuing a distinctly Pacific Northwestern tradition of self-recording indie experimentalists (Grouper, The Microphones, Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You). One of the most impactful moments came during the looming passing of a family member. With death expected, the choice was made to conduct a bizarre “living-wake” gathering—with the soon-to-be-deceased in attendance. Shortly after, Bates found himself disturbed, preoccupied with the abstraction of memory. The experience led him to reassess the tool one uses to curate our selective memories: the internet. The internet, which creeped into even more aspects of life during the pandemic, serves as our self-made digital link to the past. Its uncaring presence layered over humbling thoughts of death and his own childhood memories of the Oregon Coast as he worked on Wane Into It; life’s hyperreal texture sank into the recordings as he felt his body age and wane. Big sounds were captured in bedrooms, hallways, practice spaces, forests, and on highways throughout West Coast—vibraphones chime over black metal guitars, a mellotron drones under degraded samples, violins splinter against granular field recordings. In the process of documenting these aural moments Bates completed an MFA at Mills College, coloring the album with shades of avant-electronic and minimalist composition (Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Sarah Davachi etc…). To realize this scope Drowse collaborated with Madeline Johnston (Midwife), Alex Kent (Sprain), Lula Asplund, a chamber ensemble and more. Bates’s songwriting and production have never been more lucid; sounds flicker as he sings with fragile intensity. The record, Drowse’s third for The Flenser, impressionistically distills loss, distance, mystery, prescription drugs, the preservation of memory via recording, and ambient anxiety through its titular act: to Wane Into It, to disappear awaiting the next moon phase, water returning to sea before reemerging as a wave.

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists SCARCITY’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote Aveilut while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early Covid peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience—living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s Covid epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is this grief-stricken release, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena and macro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Enhare—with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and lyrical focus on the greatness of the void breed raw emotion, attempting to represent a catastrophe, the vastness and inevitability of things outside one’s control, as well as a direct expression of grief, a kind of requiem. Though born of Randall-Myers and Moore’s intense intimacy with absence, Aveilut is an attempt to present a harrowing universal representation of death’s true form.

Bleeding edge Texas industrialists, Street Sects have completed their long running Gentrification single project with Gentrification V: White Washed. Gentrification, is a five part serial album that began eight years ago as a series of self-released seven inches. Now that your streets have been drained of all color and character, now that the last of the generational holdouts have been forced beneath the wheels, now that history has been torn up, rewritten, injected with fillers, plied with White Claw, passed around and shared by members of the board...are you sleeping more soundly?

Mamaleek’s Kurdaitcha is finally back in print! The San Francisco-based duo released their third album of weirdo black metal, Kurdaitcha, on the legendary cult label Enemies List Home Recordings (Have a Nice Life, Giles Corey), and it quickly sold out. For years the LP has been a hard to find collector’s item. Kurdaitcha finds the project in its initial period of creating music influenced by black metal, hip hop, jazz, and spirituals. Founded in 2008 in the Bay Area by two anonymous brothers, Mamaleek has explored a vast sonic territory on the edge of a genre renown for its aversion to change. Their expert utilization of left-field samples and unconventional instrumentation, and their insistent drive to experiment continues to set the band apart from their peers. This pressing of Kurdaitcha has been remastered and features a previously unreleased bonus track with a gold foil stamped jacket.

Have A Nice Life released their debut double-album Deathconsciousness in 2008 to a whimper and critical non-interest; six years later, the band followed it up with 2014’s stunner The Unnatural World. In the meantime, Deathconsciousness has become a cult classic whose seamless blend of shoegaze, post-punk, new wave, industrial and noise influences inspires fanatic obsession. Rhythmic, primal and expansive, Deathconsciousness offers a meditation on death, loss and unrequited love, with repeated listens revealing new layers of depth and meaning.

Plumbing the depths of modern death metal with primitive elegance, Succumb have returned with their sophomore release XXI. One of the strongest up-and-coming metal bands in recent years, what sets Succumb apart from their peers is vocalist Cheri Musrasrik; the juxtaposition of death metal riffing and propulsive drums with Musrasrik’s cavernous howl and sophisticated lyrics make a unique listening experience in today’s crowded landscape. Musrasrik cites authors and poets like Yeats, Genet and Zola as her primary lyrical influences. XXI sees an allegorical look at the elements and their related mythologies. Talks about Lilith, the Orphic poems, ocean and nature deities, Dionysus, Arthurian literature, fly agaric as soma, the cosmic egg, and the Boxer Rebellion. Succumb was formed in 2014 by a group of friends with diverse musical backgrounds who share a common love for Canadian death metal, war metal, and 1990s Napalm Death. The band released their self-titled debut album in May of 2017 and received praise from publications around the globe. Blocland called it “one of the year’s most intriguing metal listens” and PopMatters named it one of the best metal albums of the year, citing: “Musrasrik’s insane delivery makes Succumb one of the strongest metal debuts to come out in 2017.” The eight new tracks that comprise XXI are sure to continue this arc of praise.

First time on vinyl! Over the last decade, SF Bay Area’s Bosse-de-Nage has operated at the forefront of the post-black metal movement, and with albums like All Fours and Further Still, the band cemented their place as touchstones of the genre. Their self-titled debut—an early foray in the blackgaze sound—was recorded in 2007, but not officially released until 2010. The CD version of the album was one of The Flenser’s first releases, and a vinyl edition has always been a critical omission in both the band’s and the label’s catalogs. Remastered and sounding better than ever. “A circling Venn diagram where math rock and black metal meet.” —spin “Bosse-De-Nage has raised the art of metal lyrics to a whole new level.” —Noisey/Vice “The group had a knack for mixing explosive post-punk and black metal.” —Pitchfork

Photosynthesis is a concept album about how plants convert sunlight into energy, how they transform carbon dioxide into the oxygen that all fauna need to breathe. The album’s eight tracks each deal with an aspect of photosynthesis, from the macro “Water” to the micro “Palisades,” which reflects the theme of botanical lungs on a microscopic level. The album culminates with “Oxygen,” holding high the imagery of “Verdant Alveolus Diaspora,” the album’s core visual theme, depicting the world’s forests as a functioning lung system’s individual cells, scattered throughout the globe. Photosynthesis is the fourth “collective” album in Botanist’s greater discography, meaning it is composed of a group of individuals. Band originator Otrebor (hammered dulcimers, vocals, keyboards) composed the music and lyrics to the drums of returning member Daturus (Botanist’s live drummer since 2017, who played on 2019’s Ecosystem) and new bassist Tony Thomas. Photosynthesis sees Botanist returning to The Flenser stable, whose partnership yielded three albums, including 2014’s VI: Flora, perhaps the project’s most noteworthy work. This release was recorded in the Verdant Realm in California. The album production was handled by Dan Swanö, a musician whose legend is equally for his enormous contributions to the Swedish melodic and progressive death metal scenes in the ’90s and ’00s, as he is for his output of top-shelf album productions from his Unisound studio. The application of Swanö’s creative genius in more artistic, avant-garde areas of the metal spectrum is a match of dreams for Botanist, resulting in an album that achieves a new level of the project’s expanding vision with production excellence.

Written at home and refined on the road, the 5 new tracks that comprise As Lost Through Collision are parts monolithic and minimalist, manic and mellow. Engineered by Josiah Mazzaschi at The Cave (Built to Spill, The Jesus and Mary Chain) and mixed by Tim Green at Louder Studios (The Melvins, Lungfish, Jawbreaker), the music here retains its organic purity and captures Sprain in its truest state. The listener can hear every instrument and every tonal deviation while the band members embrace musical and philosophical abstraction in their art practice; they emphasize sound as force, differentiating the concept of pure sound from music. And although As Lost Through Collision is a departure from their previous EP, it still retains Sprain’s former slowcore aesthetic. “This record was a conscious effort to move beyond the initial style we experimented with on our last EP into something more unique — something more ‘us,’” they comment.

Have A Nice Life was formed in a time of Dan’s and Tim’s life that reflected concerns with depression and suicidal ideation. As the following for the project has grown, and Dan and Tim have aged and faced new life challenges with family and careers, their new album Sea of Worry reflects just that. Dread is the primary theme that is woven throughout Sea of Worry - the dread of aging, children growing up, and an increasingly uncertain future. However, Sea of Worry is Have A Nice Life at the peak of their powers; Dan and Tim’s unmistakable chemistry coupled with a propulsive backing band catapults them into stratosphere. These 7 tracks ebb and flow with noise and melody, and are so well-crafted it’s near impossible to get them out of your head. More concise and perhaps more straightforward than their past releases, Have A Nice Life has found new focus and discipline on Sea of Worry and the album is a triumphant addition to their ever-evolving discography.

Hissing and Sutekh Hexen are two of the murkiest, most cacophonous groups operating in the margins of the contemporary metal underground. Now, these hellish projects come together to release a split album on The Flenser.

Since 2008, Sutekh Hexen have turned the paradigm of black metal completely on its ear. The group creates what can be described as a dense tapestry of black noise, or a wall of intricate tones deconstructing itself brick by brick. Their rich, unparalleled compositions cultivate further interest with each listen.

Founded in 2014 out of a mutual interest in deranged and punishing sounds, Seattle’s Hissing is often described as “blackened sludge.” This does little justice describing the harsh, dissonant soundscapes created by this trio. To date they have released two EPs through Disorder Recordings and Southern Lord, and have a full-length forthcoming.

San Francisco’s Succumb plumbs the depths of modern death metal with primitive elegance, but what sets them apart from their peers is vocalist Cheri Musrasrik. The juxtaposition of death metal riffing and propulsive drums with Musrasrik’s cavernous howl and sophisticated lyrics make a unique listening experience in today’s crowded landscape.

The band was formed in 2014 by a group of friends with diverse musical backgrounds who share a common love for Canadian death metal, war metal, and 1990s Napalm Death. That same year they released a demo under the name Cloak and played a handful of local shows, attracting the attention of The Flenser. The following year they were joined by Harry Cantwell (Bosse-de-Nage, ex-Slough Feg) on drums and got to work writing their self-titled debut album, recorded by Bay Area luminary Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Bosse-de-Nage, Botanist, Oathbreaker, etc.).

Musrasrik cites authors and poets like Yeats, Genet and Zola as her primary lyrical influences. Throughout the album she tackles themes such as human experimentation, autoerotic asphyxiation, BDSM, prostitution, opium dens and dystopias with a literary flair.

Father Murphy, one of the most mysterious and enigmatic musical entities to emerge from Italy in recent years, presents their fifth full-length via The Flenser. This dark psychedelic / industrial cabaret is a religion-themed concept album titled Croce (“Cross” in Italian), one side representing suffering and sacrifice and the flip reflecting what comes after—the end of suffering, resurrection, or perhaps oblivion. The work was recorded by John Dieterich in Albuquerque, NM, and mixed by Greg Saunier. From the shadowy atmospheres of Croce spring forth unexpected blurts of impossibly catchy noise pop, at times operatic like some twisted musical detailing the trials and tribulation of the crucifixion. Male and female vocals by Freddie Murphy and Chiara Lee intertwine over distorted blasts of guitar crunch, anchored by stuttering, homebuilt percussion. This sound is textural and nuanced yet noisy and chaotic, carefully sculpted into jagged shards of fragmented pop. A-side closer “In Solitude” is an appropriately dour slab of murky miserablism that sounds like a slow sonic death, a haunting dirge that dissolves into that ineffable space between the record’s two sides; the netherworld, the afterlife, Purgatory. But Father Murphy erupts from this stygian blackness with the second half of Croce—the light to the A-side’s dark.

King Woman is fronted by former Whirr vocalist Kristina Esfandiari. The group’s debut 12-inch Doubt unfurls lugubriously, blossoming into a haunting sprawl of crushing, slo-mo miserablism. Imagine some twisted fusion of PJ Harvey, Sunn 0))) and Black Sabbath. Churning washes of crumbling distortion and tar-pit riffage drift grimly through billowing clouds of dense, layered thrum; roiling backdrops for Esfandiari’s throaty, bewitching vocals. The sonic heft is matched by lyrical themes of family and religious abuse, and the suffering borne of both. Esfandiari originally formed King Woman back in 2009, but the band took a backseat to her other projects Miserable and Whirr (with whom she played from 2012 to 2013). Doubt is a follow-up to previous EP releases Dove / Fond Affections (The Native Sound) and Degrida / Sick Bed (Sleep Genius).

England / Ohio’s Mat Sweet presents his latest album under the Boduf Songs moniker via The Flenser! Stench of Exist is at once his most accessible and most esoteric work to date; from the opium flow of the tracks, running headily into one another like tributaries to river, to the muted-industrial-electronic-effected drums underscoring the spiraling melodies and fluttering drones, to the clean and rich guitar, abstracted cycles and feedback walls, its whispered doom metal masquerades as a lullaby. Stench of Exist unfolds languorously, laced with mysterious electronic filigree. Gorgeously intimate, it transforms the minimal into maximal with layers of electro-detritus wreathed in lush guitar strums, street-side field recordings, reverberating pianos and softly crooned vocals. It is a record of rain and cities and nighttime. The collision of arabesque tonalities with electronic sound and ambience brings to mind the promise of Blade Runner—half-asleep at 4:00 A.M. and slightly medicated, with pyramids and flame-spewing cityscapes in downpour glowing against the fluttering eyelids in the almost-dreaming consciousness. A record for saturnine commuters, on headphones, after sunset.

Upon its release in 2017, Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper cemented the Seattle duo’s status as one of doom metal’s most formidable acts. Its single, monolithic track also served as a tribute to the band’s former drummer Adrian Guerra, who tragically passed away the year before. Five years earlier, on the back of a highly praised demo, the band released their debut album, Longing. Featuring the original line-up of Dylan Desmond and Adrian Guerra (rip), the album was recorded by Brandon Fitzsimons (Wormwood, Samothrace). It is a time-stretching journey through darkness, pain, and suffering, and doomed minimalism that is now considered a classic of the genre. Originally released on CD by Profound Lore in 2012 and on vinyl by The Flenser, the vinyl edition has been out of print for several years until now. The Flenser is proud to offer a new pressing of this timeless masterpiece. Longing is packaged in a thick, old-style case-wrapped gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves.

Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper is one of the best metal albums of 2017. A single monolithic track, it pays tribute to the band’s former drummer Adrian Guerra, who tragically passed away in 2016. The band initially made their presence known in the US doom scene with a well-received demo in 2011. At thirty-seven minutes, this recording is a massive statement of purpose which far-eclipsed the “demo” status implied by its name. It was recorded by Brandon Fitzsimons (Wormwood), the same engineer behind the band’s first effort, Longing. Demo 2011 showcases Bell Witch’s heavy-yet-minimalist sound now lauded as timeless, relevant and undeniably sorrowful. The Flenser is proud to unleash this new pressing of a classic moment in contemporary US doom with artwork by the band’s own Adrian Guerra (rip). “Bell Witch turns funeral doom and its moribund focus into a beautiful hymn.” —Pitchfork “Bell Witch have an uncanny ability to make their metal feel ancient, spiritual, even liturgical.” —Tiny Mix Tapes

Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper is one of the best metal albums of 2017. A single monolithic track, it pays tribute to the band’s former drummer Adrian Guerra, who tragically passed away in 2016. The band initially made their presence known in the US doom scene with a well-received demo in 2011. At thirty-seven minutes, this recording is a massive statement of purpose which far-eclipsed the “demo” status implied by its name. It was recorded by Brandon Fitzsimons (Wormwood), the same engineer behind the band’s first effort, Longing. Demo 2011 showcases Bell Witch’s heavy-yet-minimalist sound now lauded as timeless, relevant and undeniably sorrowful. The Flenser is proud to unleash this new pressing of a classic moment in contemporary US doom with artwork by the band’s own Adrian Guerra (rip). “Bell Witch turns funeral doom and its moribund focus into a beautiful hymn.” —Pitchfork “Bell Witch have an uncanny ability to make their metal feel ancient, spiritual, even liturgical.” —Tiny Mix Tapes

Small light scuff on side B.
Includes original inner sleeves with seam splits.

Small light scuff on side A.
Includes original inner sleeves.

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks.

Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

“If rock ’n’ roll’s a dream, please don’t wake me.”

Midwife’s No Depression In Heaven, her fourth studio album, was written primarily in the back of vans while on tour endlessly over the course of the past few years. The record engages with the contemplative spirit of rock ’n’ roll from within a body in motion.

No Depression In Heaven explores themes of sentimentality, the interplay between dreams, memory, and fantasy, and a familiar subject seen throughout all of Midwife’s work: grief. Madeline Johnston takes a look at the tender and transcendent underneath a hard exterior of leather and studs, exposing a different side of the heavy music scene, where Johnston’s project has been living and evolving.

Recording at home in New Mexico between 2021 and 2023, Johnston aimed to create something that was rough around the edges, returning to a free recording process that was less focused on perfection and more attuned to expressing the spirit that lives inside of the songs. The album features collaborations with Chris Adolf and Michael Stein of American Culture, Ben Schurr and Tim Jordan of Nyxy Nyx, Angel Diaz of Vyva Melinkolya, and Allison Lorenzen.

Inspired by ephemeral moments that make up life on tour, the totemization of vehicles, outlaws, and the psyche of America’s underbelly, No Depression In Heaven affirms Johnston’s existential status as a woman of the highway.