Staring Into the Void With Neurosis

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #199. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Ruminations on the power of the riff.

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“The separation that burns our hearts
Is the root of all our disease
We’ve forgotten how to live so we suffer
We’ve forgotten how to struggle so we suffer
We’ve forgotten how to die so we suffer
We’ve forgotten we are wild so we suffer
We exist in isolation so we suffer

The dissonance is deafening”

These are the words that open An Undying Love for a Burning World, the recently-released surprise record from long-running psychedelic doom metal pioneers Neurosis, reading like a sermon on modernity separating humanity from its sense of purpose. It’s brief and to the point, two things that are rarely true about a Neurosis track. Its follow-up “Mirror Deep” kicks off with a verbal salvo of “shut up” shouted repeatedly into a cavernous void of sound that drives the message home. The takeaway is that Neurosis has some things to say about [gestures broadly at everything]. And for the next hour, they’re going to talk, and we’re going to listen.

Coming from a lesser entity than Neurosis, this message and delivery could come across pretentious. When the messenger is none other than Aaron Turner of Isis fame, now paired with the only atmospheric metal band more influential than his own, we can be assured the word is coming from a place of earned wisdom. With an average age in their mid-50s, the Turner-fronted incarnation of Neurosis is not naive nor prone to talking out of turn. They have reemerged from darkness not because we asked them to, but because they had no choice.

So those of us amongst the unwashed masses of metallic sludge worshippers gather willfully to have our eardrums pounded in while we reflect upon the nature of our weakness and the failings of the society we participate in. The fact that this record exists is remarkable for several reasons, not least of which being that Aaron fucking Turner is now in Neurosis. They also managed to keep this record a secret until it was released in March of this year, a feat akin to a tectonic shift in the earth’s crust arriving without warning. Many had assumed Neurosis was finished in 2022 after the former founding member Scott Kelly was found to have abused his family. That would have been understandable, though moving forward with the only frontman with a name that carries as much weight as their own in post-metal circles was a better move.

So, what does a Turner-fronted incarnation of Neurosis sound like in 2026? Well, that may be the one thing that’s exactly what long-time fans would expect; it sounds like Neurosis at the top of their game. After one spin through An Undying Love for a Burning World, it’s clear they have lost none of the edge that made records like Through Silver and Blood and A Sun That Never Sets doom metal cornerstones. Age has done nothing to dull their sense of sonic devastation; all of the mid-tempo groove, slow psychedelia and guttural grind they have taught us to love over the past three-plus decades are here in fine form. If anything, experience has made their message and delivery more potent, their rage more measured and focused.

Neurosis remain masters of making eight-plus minute songs feel much more compact than their actual runtime, following their dark muse where it leads, without being overly self-indulgent. The verses on “Blind” see the band at their most straightforward, locking into a mesmerizing groove that could almost get your head bobbing if only that wouldn’t look too metal. “Untethered” clocks in at a merciful 4:02, bouncing along on an odd-time signature that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Coalesce or Jesus Lizard record. The record closes out with its two lengthiest tracks (“In the Waiting Hours” at 10:15 and “Last Light” at 16:57), each finding a way to wash out of the speakers in ambient waves of gorgeous grit and sludge, economy of time be damned.

Indeed, across the record, Neurosis proves that substance beats either concision or extrapolation in a vacuum; if something is good, it will hold the listener’s attention, and they trust the audience to stick with them through dynamic shifts and extended jams. In other words, these songs are just as short or long as they need to be, not kept brief to appease dwindling attention spans, nor drawn out to satisfy their own ego. There’s an understanding here that underneath all the layers of distortion and anguished philosophizing, this is still just rock and roll. With that said, they are more than capable of keeping extended sections engaging by weaving subtle hooks throughout the layered cacophony; the phased guitar swirls on “Seething and Scattered” and haunting synths on “Blind” are both cases in point.

The world that Neurosis professes to love didn’t know it needed another record from them. Despite all odds, it got one anyway. Whether or not one is sold on its premise that modernity has separated us from our humanity, there is value in a record that’s willing to be intellectually challenging without pretense, introspective without self-absorption, and heavy as absolute hell on Earth. If there is a broadly-relatable lesson to be learned here, it may be that no matter what is happening in your surroundings, focus and integrity serve as guiding lights through adversity. Cold comfort for a world that wants easy answers to hard problems. But comfort nonetheless.

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Ben Sailer is a writer and critic who has been freezing in Fargo, ND for more than two decades. You can follow him on Bluesky.