Reviews: Godflesh, The Ocean, Lacrimas Profundere, Lustmord Lombardo (Spike)

Godflesh – Decay (Relapse Records)

There are certain bands whose releases don't just sit on a digital wish list; they demand a physical trip down to the local record shop. Godflesh have always belonged in that category for me. 

Ever since the suffocating machine clatter of Streetcleaner rewrote the rulebook for what heavy music could be, Justin Broadrick and G.C. Green have been immovable fixtures in British industrial metal. Knowing that Decay serves as their penultimate record before eventually drawing the curtains on the project made bagging a physical copy on release day essential. It hasn't left the turntable since.

Clocking in at six sprawling tracks across forty-two minutes, Decay strips the band's sonic framework back to its bleakest, most hypnotic core. If you came looking for rapid-fire shouting, you’ll be in for a surprise. 

Broadrick reportedly utters fewer than 150 words across the entire record, letting massive, mechanized grooves and tectonic bass frequencies do all the communicating. Between recent health battles, surgeries, and the decision to retire the band from the live touring circuit, that physical exhaustion and psychological weariness bleeds right into the iron grooves of the music.

The album opens with Master And Slave, an eight-and-a-half-minute exercise in slow-motion bludgeon. Built on a lurching, down tuned seven-string riff and Green’s trademark iron-plated bassline, it locks you into a trance before you even realize how heavy the pressure has gotten. It rolls seamlessly into Living/Ending, which leans into that classic, pulsing Godflesh drum-machine cadence; cold, relentless, and completely indifferent to human comfort.

What makes this record feel so poignant is its atmosphere of deliberate, unhurried restraint. Cuts like Feral Colony and Fear Of Man don't rush to hit you with cheap adrenaline spikes; they let the dread simmer. The repetitive, hypnotic dirge feels like wandering through an abandoned industrial estate at twilight, watching the rust slowly eat away at the concrete.

By the time you reach Fodder and the eleven-minute closer Consume Me, you realise Godflesh aren't going out with frantic thrash; they’re delivering an epic, meditative funeral march. Consume Me is pure, droning catharsis. It’s a haunting, mesmerizing farewell that leaves you sitting in absolute quiet as the needle finally hits the run-out groove.

Decay isn't an easy listen, but Godflesh were never meant to be comfortable. It is a bleak, monolithic, and deeply moving record from two pioneers who have absolutely nothing left to prove to anyone. An absolute must-own on vinyl. 9/10

The Ocean – Solaris (Pelagic Records)

Few bands in the modern heavy realm operate with the sheer intellectual ambition of Robin Staps and The Ocean Collective. Over two decades, they've taken us from the prehistoric depths of the ocean floor right through deep geological time and the dawn of humankind. After closing the door on that era and seeing long-time frontman Loïc Rossetti bow out, Solaris finds the collective looking outward into the cold cosmos and the surreal psychological terrain of Stanisław Lem’s legendary sci-fi opus.

Make no mistake: there are truly epic moments scattered across this record. When they lock into their expansive groove, the scale is staggering. But I’ll be completely honest, sitting down with Solaris, it felt like a bit too much at times. The sheer volume of ideas, long instrumental tangents, and cinematic shifts can feel overwhelming. Maybe as a reviewer, I haven’t given it as much dedicated time as an album of this weight truly deserves, because an Ocean record is rarely something that fully reveals its hand on the first few passes.

The journey kicks off with the coordinates 52°30'11"N 13°26'12"E, an atmospheric intro that gives way to Departure Song. It wastes little time establishing this new chapter, introducing new vocalists Enrico Tiberi and Lane Shi alongside crushing post-metal dynamics. It rolls straight into Light Pollution, a sprawling ten-minute beast that bridges the electronic textures of Holocene with towering, crushing climaxes.

The monolithic centre of the record is Simulacra, clocking in at over seventeen minutes. It’s an enormous journey that drifts through krautrock-inspired synths, ambient lulls, and sudden explosions of heavy groove. It probably needs this massive canvas to do proper justice to Lem's narrative of an alien, living planet projecting hallucinations onto the human psyche, but it also tests your patience if you aren't completely dialled in.

Things sharpen up with Belligerence and Ultima Esperanza, where the heavy brass accents and dense polyrhythms hit with familiar physical force. Closing out with the melancholic drift of Milk Of My Dream and the coordinates 51°28′30″S 73°6′11″W, you’re left feeling completely spent.

Solaris is an ambitious, sprawling work that doesn’t hand out easy rewards. It can feel like a heavy emotional and mental overload at points, but there is so much craft beneath the surface that it demands repeat visits. A solid 8 out of 10 that might well grow into something even bigger once it’s had time to settle in. 8/10

Lustmord Lombardo – The Pulse Of Atoms (Ipecac Recordings)

When you see the name Dave Lombardo on an album sleeve, your brain immediately primes itself for a very specific kind of physical experience. Whether he's driving the thrasher engine of Slayer, navigating the chaotic carnival antics of Mr. Bungle, or anchoring Dead Cross and Fantômas, the man is a human metronome of violence and groove. 

So sitting down with The Pulse Of Atoms, his collaborative release on Ipecac with dark ambient godfather Brian Williams (Lustmord), it was hard not to walk in with high expectations of hearing Lombardo letting rip on a proper kit.

I'll be completely upfront about it: if you come in hunting for double-kick artillery or fast, snarling thrash fills, you are going to be left scratching your head. Lombardo is here, absolutely, but his presence feels less like an equal co-driver and more like a subtle, atmospheric guest artist relegated to the margins. This is very much Lustmord’s territory. Williams built the terrifying, abyss-staring sonic blueprint of dark ambient and industrial rumble decades ago, and The Pulse Of Atoms lives, breathes, and suffocates firmly inside that realm.

The record opens with the two-part suite An Eternal Presence. Part I, Unknown, creeps out of the void with sub-bass tremors and eerie, tectonic frequencies that feel like tectonic plates grinding against each other deep in the ocean floor. Lombardo’s input here is whisper-thin, barely a tap or an ominous rattle. By Part II, Relentless, percussive textures start to take clearer shape, but it’s still far removed from conventional rhythmic songwriting. It’s an exercise in sheer, creeping dread.

Things find firmer footing on Paleomagnetic Resonance and Beyond The Vast Cold Waste. Here, Lombardo steps out from the shadows with jazzy, muted flourishes and syncopated cymbal washes that lend Williams’ icy soundscapes an eerie organic pulse. The fourth track even brings in pulsing, Krautrock-tinged synthesizer lines, keeping the composition from evaporating into a formless, endless fog.

The two-part movement of The Desolate Shore, spanning Submergence and Emergence is arguably the most evocative stretch on the record. It feels like standing on an alien coastline at twilight, listening to the groans of dying ships and distant foghorns while strange metal objects scrape in the dark. By the time the ten-minute drone bath of The Abyssal Deep draws the curtain, you feel like you've been submerged in a pitch-black sensory deprivation tank.

Let’s not take anything away from Brian Williams: as an architectural work of dark ambient sound design, this record is at times genuinely terrifying and technically stunning. It demands to be played at room-shaking volume on a great set of monitors so the sub-frequencies can actually rattle the foundations of the house.

Yet you can't entirely shake the feeling that Lombardo's monstrous talents could have been woven into the tapestry with a bit more muscle. It leaves you wondering whether there is any boundary Dave won't cross, his appetite for adventurous, left-field collaborations seems completely bottomless, and that alone makes anything he touches well worth investigating. 

An unsettling, beautifully crafted drone experience, even if it leaves you wishing the drum throne had been turned up just a notch higher in the mix. 8/10

Lacrimas Profundere – Lay Me Down O Silent Fear (Steamhammer / SPV)

One of the great joys of writing for Musipedia of Metal is the sheer volume of music you run into that somehow managed to slip beneath your radar over the years. With over three decades of existence and fourteen full-length albums under their belts, German veterans Lacrimas Profundere aren’t exactly fresh-faced newcomers. Yet, sitting down with Lay Me Down O Silent Fear, I have to confess this is my very first introduction to the band. And on the strength of what’s blasting out of the speakers here, it leaves me wondering where on earth I’ve been and wishing I’d stumbled onto them years ago.

For someone coming in completely fresh, what immediately strikes you is the cocktail of styles colliding beneath the surface. It wears its gothic rock ancestry proudly on its sleeve, there’s an unmistakable, brooding Ville Valo/HIM swagger in the baritone vocals but anyone expecting polite, dusty goth-rock is going to get their teeth rattled. Across these ten tracks, the band splices melancholic, dark-romantic melodrama with abrasive death metal growls, down-tuned modern crunch, and the kinetic urgency of contemporary metalcore.

The album wastes no time making that point with the opener, Days Of Doom. It hits with an aggressive, punchy tempo and jagged guitar riffs from founding member Oliver Nikolas Schmid before vocalist Julian Larre steps up to the mic. 

Larre is a total chameleon here, shifting effortlessly between deep, smoky croons and ferocious, throat-tearing roars. It rolls straight into Nevermore, which pairs stadium-sized, melancholic hooks with heavy double-kick battery, proving they know how to deliver infectious choruses without blunting their heavier edges.

Things get even more intriguing on Heart I Will Break You Before You Break Me, where the band leans into an off-kilter, muscular groove that balances Anathema-style emotional fragility with genuine Danzig-esque swagger. The centrepiece title track, O Silent Fear, stretches out past the five-minute mark, letting lush, gothic atmosphere build and simmer before dropping into crushing, wall-of-sound climaxes. It feels grand, theatrical, and deeply immersive.

Down the back half of the record, the band keeps their foot firmly on the pedal. Agony (In Dread And Dust) and Faceless deliver sharp, compact blasts of energy, while Arcane Promises taps into the aching, bittersweet melodicism that fans of vintage Finnish gothic metal like Sentenced or Charon will instantly recognize. 

Meanwhile, tracks like A Sinful Desire and Veil XV push the rhythm section to the fore, delivering pit-ready bounce and teeth-grinding weight before the elegiac finale of At The End Of A Dream Lies The Hope You Once Killed brings the curtain down.

Lay Me Down O Silent Fear is a brilliant, dark, and surprisingly heavy record from a veteran outfit that clearly has zero intention of resting on past glories. It’s got huge hooks, plenty of grit, and that unmistakable dark-romantic goth atmosphere done with real bite. As an entry point, it’s completely hooked me, and I’m already off to start digging back through their fourteen-album back catalogue to see what else I’ve missed. 8/10