Unself
Conjurer always sounded to me like a British quartet that has always followed the margins of what's expected, emerging from Rugby, Warwickshire, England, and forging a sound that mixes sludge, doom and post-metal with a certain irreverence.
Since their first album Mire (2018), through Páthos (2022), they had been solidifying a reputation for chiseled brutality, crushing riffs and somber atmospheres. But with the release of Unself, I feel that Conjurer is no longer just showing its muscle, it's displaying its soul.
Initial immersion and atmosphere
From the first seconds of the album, I felt like I was entering a labyrinth, first, an almost folkloric and acoustic introduction, whispering something vulnerable, and soon after being run over by a sonic avalanche of amplifiers, low-tuned guitars and screams. This contrast between calm and cataclysm already defines well the journey of Unself.
The album opens with a delicate acoustic to soon transform into a wall of physical and emotional weight. This dissonance between introspection and fury will be a constant and for those who live heavy metal, it's refreshing to perceive this duality.
The sonic core: weight, dynamics and evolution
At the core of the album is a combination of crushing riffs and more careful compositions, with turns that don't deliver the obvious. Vibrating in zones of sludge and post-metal, Conjurer here allows itself to use both the hammer shower, blast beats, crushing guitars as well as breathing spaces, dark melodies and clean vocals.
For example, the tracks 'All Apart', 'There Is No Warmth' and 'The Searing Glow' are moments where the band's nickname sauron of the riff makes sense but which don't cling only to brutality. The dynamics work: strategic silences, intros, interludes like 'A Plea', and then back to carnage with meaning. This sonic maturation, which doesn't abandon aggression, but molds it, is what impresses me most.
Thematics, vulnerability and identity
Beyond the weight and sonic texture, what really hooked me was how the album deals with themes of identity, belonging and discomfort with the world around but without sounding "beauty, now I'm vulnerable". It's raw, direct: for example, guitarist/vocalist Dani Nightingale (co-founder of the band) was diagnosed with autism and identified as non-binary, which fed the lyrics and atmospheres of this work.
This baggage makes Unself more than a heavy metal album, it makes it a reflection of internal struggles, of alienation and the need to find a space where one fits. I felt this as if it were an open wound, but healing itself little by little in the form of sound.
Cohesion as an album and the global experience
As a whole, Unself behaves more like a solid block than a simple collection of tracks. The ordering of the songs, the moments of calm before the storm, the interludes, everything conspires to make listening to it a journey. This is clearly Conjurer's most cohesive work to date.
Particularly, for me, the bridge between the most devastating songs and the more melodic ones was where the album triumphs, for example, 'Let Us Live' appears as an emotional center, offering beauty within chaos.
My final opinion: worth the listen and how to listen to it
If I had to summarize in one sentence: Unself is an album that weighs like a ton, but wraps around you like a cold blanket on a sleepless night. For those accustomed to extreme metal, it delivers the expected elements: monolithic riffs, blast beats, discontinuous vocals. But it does more: it allows itself to breathe, reflect, bare itself.
It's not just destruction, it's reconstruction. From my point of view, this album deserves to be heard with quality headphones, at a time when you have time to absorb the details, because it pays good dividends on repetition. If you like metal with depth, that combines the brutal with the human, Unself is one of the best bets of 2025. And as a metal fan that I am, I'm already wanting to see them live to feel this album explode on stage.
