MONOLORD’s Neverending — Thirteen Years Deep, Still Digging – Album Review

There is a particular trap waiting for any doom band that achieves institutional status: the slow calcification of a sound into a brand. Monolord have spent thirteen years building one of stoner/doom’s most recognizable identities — fuzz-drenched, unhurried, hypnotic — and Neverending, their sixth full-length, represents the most deliberate attempt yet to resist that gravitational pull toward self-imitation.

The Gothenburg trio has earned its standing. Empress Rising (2014) announced them as a serious force in the genre; Rust (2017) deepened the vocabulary; No Comfort (2019) pushed the atmospheric density to its logical ceiling. By the time Your Time to Shine arrived in 2021, Monolord had achieved something rare — a sound so fully formed it required no external validation. Neverending doesn’t dismantle that foundation. It asks, quietly but pointedly, whether the foundation is a platform or a cage.

Much of that interrogation runs through the decision to record with Sylvia Massy — an engineer and producer whose credits span Tool’s Undertow, System of a Down’s debut, and Johnny Cash’s late-career American sessions. That is not a résumé that points toward conventional metal production, which is precisely why the choice is interesting. Massy reportedly asked Jäger to send her everything — not just the songs written for this record, but a decade’s worth of stray riffs and half-finished ideas — and curated from there. The effect on the album is audible: Neverending breathes differently than its predecessors. The low-end mass is intact, but Massy has introduced negative space as an active compositional element. What surrounds the riffs now carries weight equal to the riffs themselves. Mastering by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege preserves that balance without sterilizing it.

The tonal shift is announced immediately. Jäger has cited “Hotel California” and “No Quarter” as spiritual touchstones for opener “Iodine” — not as sonic templates, but as examples of a particular kind of wide-frame patience. You can hear what he means. The track withholds its full commitment longer than Monolord typically allow themselves, building a cinematic tension before the riff finally arrives and settles its full mass down onto the listener. It is a studied piece of structural restraint from a band that has historically trusted volume to do that work.

Lead single “You Bastard” operates differently — propulsive, groove-driven, closer in energy to the hard-edged end of their catalog than to any funeral pacing. But the lyrical content complicates its momentum deliberately. Jäger writes the song from two simultaneous vantages on suicide: the person who leaves, and the person left behind carrying the resulting wreckage. The tension between that subject matter and the track’s forward motion is not accidental. Neverending is, across its eight songs, a more nakedly personal record than anything Monolord have released — Jäger has spoken openly about recent life upheavals informing the writing, and the shift from the band’s usual religious and existential abstraction toward something rawer and more relational is felt across the album’s middle stretch.

“Inside a Collider,” at just over eight minutes, is where that emotional register hits its densest point. The eight-minute “Oozing Wound” returns to something closer to the doom architecture that built Monolord‘s name — a repetitive, down-tuned riff pulling itself forward through sheer dogged persistence, the rhythm section peeling away at measured intervals to expose the underlying structure before the guitars reassert themselves. It is the album’s most familiar-feeling track, and that familiarity reads as a deliberate anchor rather than a failure of imagination.

The closing title track earns its position as the record’s centerpiece. “It’s Neverending” brings in Jörgen Sandström — Entombed alumnus, a vocalist whose death-metal register carries genuine Scandinavian extremity behind it — to handle vocal duties in place of Jäger. The contrast is stark and purposeful: Sandström’s voice against Monolord‘s slow-grinding doom produces a texture that is genuinely unsettling rather than merely aggressive, the kind of ugliness that feels earned rather than deployed for effect. “The hymns you sung, can’t be defended / Thin veils you spun, it’s neverending.” The album ends without resolution, which turns out to be exactly the right choice.

At eight tracks and under forty-five minutes, Neverending is the most concise argument Monolord have made for themselves. The band that once measured ambition in running time and fuzz density is now measuring it in precision — in what gets cut, what gets kept, and what gets handed to silence.

Thirteen years in, Monolord still understand the thing most doom bands never figure out: the riff isn’t the point — the mood it leaves behind is.

CREDITS

• Thomas V Jäger – Guitars, vocals and keys
• Esben Willems – Drums and percussion
• Mika Häkki – Bass and piano
• Vocals on “It’s Neverending” by Jörgen Sandström
• Written by Thomas V Jäger
• Arranged and performed by Monolord
• Recorded by Sylvia Massy, assisted by Noah Taylor
• Produced and mixed by Sylvia Massy
• Mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege

TOUR DATES

• June 11 San Diego, CA Casbah
• June 12 Santa Cruz, CA The Catalyst
• June 13 San Francisco, CA Great American Music Hall
• June 14 Sacramento, CA Harlow’s
• June 16 Eugene, OR John Henry’s
• June 17 Portland, OR Nova PDX
• June 18 Seattle, WA Substation
• June 19 Bellingham, WA Structures Brewing
• June 20 Tacoma, WA Airport Tavern Music Hall
• June 23 Denver, CO Marquis Theater
• June 24 Salt Lake City, UT Urban Lounge
• June 25 Las Vegas, NV Swan Dive
• June 26 Pioneertown, CA Pappy & Harriet’s
• June 27 Los Angeles, CA The Regent Theater

Tracklist: