When Scott Kelly was fired from Neurosis in 2019 for abusing his family, a horror which became public knowledge in 2022, it raised a troubling question about the function of the band’s music – and by extension, heavy music more broadly. Was there a healthy catharsis at the centre of their art? Or was it an externalisation of an insoluble, inner darkness that resided in Kelly, and others like him?
Neurosis’ new album, An Undying Love For A Burning World, their first in ten years surprise-released yesterday, doesn’t provide an easy answer. But it does thoroughly explore the question. Neurosis have recruited former ISIS frontman Aaron Turner into the lineup as singer-guitarist alongside the longstanding Steve Von Till. It’s a brilliant move. When he selected his Baker’s Dozen favourite records for this site, Turner said that the 1993 Neurosis album Enemy Of The Sun blew him away, was “its own universe” and retained “a big element of mystery within it”. It follows that listening to this new album we take Turner’s perspective entering the mysteries of Neurosis, as he carves his own space within their realm.
Neurosis is reaping the benefits of Turner’s participation. Riding high from recent creative peak The Healer, released by his band Sumac in 2024, Turner’s ferocious roar offers Von Till a new kind of sparring partner. They double-track Turner’s howl and Von Till’s clean vocals on ‘Blind’, creating layers of intensity in contrast to the vocal back and forth on ‘Fire Is The End Lesson’ from last album, Fires Within Fires. Kelly and Von Till often sounded like a Janus-faced singer – one body with two voices. After the fracture in the Neurosis lineup occurred, An Undying Love For A Burning World is the sound of the struggle to be reborn and live with the consequences.
Throughout this album, Neurosis are trying to make the pieces fit in a world that is hopelessly disconnected. The stuttering guitar on ‘Seething And Scattered’ is the closest this monumental band comes to sounding tentative, bemused at how humanity cannot connect with “all that is sacred”. Noah Landis’ modular synths coat this track, and much of the album, with a kind of membrane as this new form of Neurosis lurches and claws itself into being on ‘Mirror Deep’ and ‘First Red Rays’. The synths give the latter a celestial ambience before a wonderful, blanketing vocal melody takes the band down new paths in its finale (recalling latter-period Enslaved).
Also new are the dissonant major chord progressions five minutes into 16-minute, pulsing closer ‘Last Light’. Its lyrics offer little comfort as we are “cast from sun into shade”. But it does confirm the inevitable: “Time hangs heavy upon our skin / Descending the days of a wavering light”.
Turner’s involvement has the additional effect of making Neurosis sometimes sound like some of the post-metal bands they have influenced. It’s hard to listen to the ten minutes of ‘In The Waiting Hours’ and not think of the wending abrasiveness of Cult Of Luna’s last album, The Long Road North.
It’s almost exactly thirty years since Neurosis released one of the most terrifying albums ever recorded, Through Silver In Blood. A sample used on ‘Become The Ocean’ from that record notes how the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August, the date that annually commemorates the transfiguration of Christ: “thus unconsciously signalling that we intended likewise to transform the world, not only after the light but after darkness”.
An Undying Love For A Burning World follows Converge’s Love Is Not Enough this year as a pivotal metal album about acknowledging the darkness for what it is and trying to accept it. On a planet where “the hive has lost its fucking mind” (‘Untethered’), and following what seemed to be a mortal blow after Kelly’s expulsion, Neurosis’ return is something to marvel at. This new album has the smouldering afterburn quality of 2001’s A Sun That Never Sets, with a bite and psychedelia all its own. This new music is carefully constructed, cerebral, intrinsically heavy, and has the quiet amazement of someone looking at their near-forgotten reflection. It’s not a complete transfiguration, but owns its corner of darkness, and shines precious shards of light on what might come.
An Undying Love For A Burning World is available to pre-order on physical formats
