Unholy Hell Yes, the question is, has THOU just released the sickest sludge album of 2024? Only time will tell, but I will say that their new LP Umbilical (out now on Sacred Bones) is gnarly AF!!! I was hooked instantly once I heard “Narcissist’s Prayer,” this song kicks you in the chest and Brian’s vocal tone will make your eyes bleed. I have always said that rad Sludge is like modern day Blues, and this record only proves me right. THOU have mastered turning their unhinged sonic stench into morbid D-Tuned anthems that in a weird way are uplifting. They also know how to layer their audio hate with sounds that add more tension. Let’s unpack the tune “Emotional Terrorist” — imagine if Sun Ra, Eyehategod, and Killing Joke all decided to collabo together, the outcome might sound like this song. I can’t over how HUGE this band’s walls of DIRGE are — every fucking RIFF they lay down is fucking MAMMOTH. Umbilical hits like the state of our world, all fucked up with no hope, just total despair and filth. THOU as a unit are on some next level shit, and I’m hooked on them for sure. At certain points while blasting their song “Lonely Vigil” I began to feel like my reality was being altered and I would never be the same after experiencing this auditory journey into nothingness. If THOU reads this, I want them to know that they fucking KILLED IT and then some! It should be noted that underneath all of their D-TUNED motion exists an industrial current that holds this album together!
They’ve called us anarchists, criminals, foreign meddlers, lunatics, dispossessed, relativists, utilitarians, egoists, passion maximizers, ascetics, negators of everything. Clearly, the “Thou” experiment is never going to appeal to audiences who demand that art rigorously enforce a coherent and righteous worldview.
And yet, are we not ourselves constrained by our own rigid morality? In those quiet moments of deep contemplation, when the bargains and concessions are thoroughly examined, when we yield before the Judging Eye–what is the summation of our choices? If the unspoiled self beyond the immensity of time were given voice, what pronouncements would be made? What would such an internal audit yield? What undeniable character would be revealed?
This record is for the radicals, the crackpots, the exiles who have escaped the wasteland of capitulation. This record is for the militants and zealots refusing to surrender to comforts, to practicalities, to thirty pieces of silver. And this record is most especially for the weaklings and malingerers, burdened by capricious indulgence, hunched by the deep wounds of compromise, shuffling in limp approximation, desperately reaching back towards integrity and conviction.”
Thou
