Album Review: Shrineburner – Hymns Of Despair
Reviewed by Rich Sargeant
Forming in 2023, Shrineburner’s debut LP Hymns of Despair releasing 11th September offers up a monolithic wall of sludge largely focused on the band’s discontent with the hypocrisies of organised religion and bristling against the world’s slow decent into an unsalvageable hellscape. Not to be confused with their fellow Chicago-based doom outfit Shrinebuilder.
The album opens with a roughly minute long eerily droning intro ‘Void of Guilt’ – nicely allowing a quiet sense of dread to start to build and as a wise man once said: “the longer the note, the longer the dread” before crashing into the ~ten-minute epic ‘Spectral Cataclysm’ a crushing, defiant stand against organised religion and a rejection of our modern obsession with wealth. The following track ‘Bodies Dragged into Sunlight’ picks up the urgency with a misanthropic message about every-day people being sacrificed to benefit the elite, it is also the first single to be released from the album (probably wisely as it weighs in at a mere 6 minutes long compared to most of the rest of the album). ‘Slow Death Chant’ continues in similar fashion with some excellent Mastodon-esque riffs also clocking in at around five and half minutes.
The last two tracks ‘An Ocean of Broken Hope’ and the titular ‘Hymns of Despair’ are both take on exploring the futility of modern life while also allowing a small shred of hope to pierce through all the gloom both coming back into the meatier side being twelve and ten minutes respectively.
Overall, Hymns of Despair is one of the most impressive debuts of the year. This is a band exuding confidence despite only being in their third year of existence with a clear uncompromising vision and message to spread. This album isn’t for the faint of heart and demands the listener’s full attention but those that have the stomach will find a potential album of the year contender.
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