The Gothenburg trio of Thomas Jäger, Mika Häkki, and Esben Willems have, over the course of six albums, established themselves as one of the most vital forces in modern doom, and with Neverending – their sixth full-length and latest for Relapse Records – they have delivered something genuinely surprising. Because this time, Monolord have changed the blueprint.
This is Monolord streamlined – and the fidelity to the song rather than the riff turns out to be an extraordinarily good look on them.
Whatever you expect from a Monolord opener, “Iodine” will confound it. This is, believe it or not, a track that draws its inspiration from the classic rock epics of the seventies – the kind of slow-burning, arena-filling patience you might find in Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, or The Eagles at their most stately. It is not a straightforward doom riff-fest. It builds. It breathes. It earns its peaks. Under Massy’s production, the track achieves a kind of cinematic grandeur that Monolord have never quite reached before – which is saying something for a band whose whole deal has always been enormity. An immediate statement that something is different here.
If “Iodine” announces a new chapter, “You Bastard” is the chapter everyone is going to be talking about. Built around a verse-chorus engine of uncommon stickiness for a doom band, it drives forward on a riff that belongs in any conversation about the year’s best. Jäger’s vocals carry the full weight of what the song is actually about – the anguish of being left behind by someone lost to suicide, the anger that mingles with grief when the person you loved made a choice you could not stop. The chorus hits with the kind of emotional directness that heavy music often gestures toward and rarely achieves. Absolutely devastating, and delivered with complete control.
The album’s early momentum continues to build with “Inside A Collider,” a track that leans harder into the band’s doom roots after the one-two punch of its predecessors. The density here is deliberate – Häkki and Willems lock together into something relentless and hypnotic, and Jäger’s guitar has the fuzz dialled to maximum, the kind of tone that makes your teeth feel loose. There is nothing revolutionary happening in “Inside A Collider.” But there is everything good about Monolord in its purest form, executed without waste. On an album about precision, it is the track that reminds you what the band has always been capable of when the mechanism is oiled and pointed downhill.
The album’s most complex moment is also its most emotionally rich, and also, frustratingly, the one that ends too soon. “Crystal Bridge” opens with a sludge groove that nods to the Carolinian heaviness of Corrosion of Conformity, lurching and mean and deeply satisfying. Then Jäger steps back, and the track pivots to something far more intimate – clean chords, plaintive vocals, a sudden vulnerability that lands like a gut punch after the previous bruising. The transition is handled with the confidence of a band that knows exactly what they are doing, and the payoff is stunning. It just ends too quickly. That this feels like a complaint rather than a flaw tells you everything about the quality of what is on offer here.
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Monolord have always been a heavy band, but “Oozing Wound” is a different kind of heavy. The tuning drops to a place their catalogue has not previously visited, generating a low-end density that is genuinely new sonic territory for the trio. This is Monolord, lower and slower than ever before, and the effect is almost physically overwhelming. If the album around it is a study in restraint and focus, “Oozing Wound” is the moment where the old maximal instinct reasserts itself – and it is magnificent for it.
The album’s most playful moment arrives in the form of “The Masque,” a blues-rooted stomp with a darkness running beneath its swagger. The riff has a menace to it that keeps the track from sliding into anything too comfortable, and the chorus is one of the record’s most immediately satisfying – catchy enough to stick, heavy enough to matter. One more spin through that chorus would have turned a very good track into an essential one. As it stands, this is still among the record’s highlights, a demonstration that even in their most immediate mode, Monolord understands the value of weight.
Where “The Masque” grins at you, “Invisible” looks clean through you. A more introspective track that anchors the album’s penultimate position with genuine emotional gravity, it is one of the quieter arguments here for the value of the new approach. Jäger’s vocals are at their most exposed, Willems’ drumming measured and precise, and the overall texture is one of a band trusting the song to carry the weight rather than leaning on volume or density to do the work. It is the most understated track on the record and, in the right frame of mind, the most affecting.
How do you close an album called Neverending? You do something you have never done before. “It’s Neverending” is the first Monolord track on which Thomas Jäger does not sing – instead, the death-metal vocal duties fall to Jörgen Sandström, longtime bassist of Grave and former member of Entombed, whose performance is, by any measure, extraordinary. The result is a deathly-doom epic that closes the album on an entirely different emotional register than everything before it. Jäger, in interviews, has described hearing the finished vocal take as a moment that left him laughing from sheer euphoria at how good it was. He is not wrong. It is a jaw-dropping closer that earns the album’s title completely: after eight tracks that document a band’s evolution in real time, this is a statement that the transformation is not finished. It is, genuinely, never-ending.
Neverending is not simply one of Monolord’s best records. It is the record that proves this band’s best work may still lie ahead – and that is an extraordinary thing to be able to say about a group entering their fourteenth year together. Sylvia Massy’s production has done something remarkable here: it has pushed Monolord to excavate the song inside the riff, to trust melody and structure as much as volume and repetition, and to deliver an album that hits harder in its concision than their longer records did in their sprawl.
The tracklist is immaculate. The performances are career-best. The Jörgen Sandström closer is one of the most arresting final tracks any doom record has produced this decade. And running at eight tight, focused, emotionally honest songs, it demands absolutely nothing of you except your full attention – which it will have whether you give it willingly or not.
Highest possible recommendation. Now go turn it up.
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Neverending is out on May 29th via Relapse Records.
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