Album Review: Liminal Spirit – Forfeiture Hymns

Album Review: Liminal Spirit – Forfeiture Hymns

Reviewed by Rick Eaglestone

The one-man project of Milwaukee multi-instrumentalist Jerry Hauppa, known to many for his work in Northless, Ara, Acanthrophis and Deorbit, has spent the last couple of years quietly constructing a bleak and interlocking universe, and Forfeiture Hymns, his second full-length, digs deeper into it than ever before.

This is very much a concept album in the truest sense, picking up the thread of 2025’s Unwell, which followed Phillip Hastings through his last days in a nursing home, and rewinding to trace his life from the cradle onwards. The twist is that Phillip is never the narrator. Instead, each song belongs to someone whose path he crossed and poisoned, every one of them pushed towards taking their own life, which makes for heavy listening in every sense. A Mother’s Instinct opens proceedings and sets that uneasy tone immediately, a slow, heavy introduction to a world where love and dread sit far too close together. It is a patient start, but a purposeful one, planting seeds that will bloom into something profoundly disturbing as the record unfolds.

Unwanted follows and tells you plenty about where this story is heading. Hauppa’s approach blends doom, drone and industrial, and here the grinding, mechanical weight of the latter two pushes to the fore, the riffs feeling less played than pressed down upon the listener. Anyone who has spent time with Godflesh or Jesu will recognise the lineage, though Hauppa twists it into something altogether more personal and far more uncomfortable.

The Initiate is where the concept truly bites. It tells of Tommy Pearson, a young boy desperate to win a place among the children who orbit Phillip, and it begins with an almost innocent, sing-song lightness that evokes schoolyard games. That innocence curdles with real skill, the track accelerating into something panicked and chaotic as Tommy, bloodied and begging to belong, is swept further out of his depth. It is genuinely unsettling, the sound of childhood being stolen in real time, and one of the strongest things here.

Apoptosis takes its name from the process by which a cell destroys itself, and it is hard to think of a more fitting metaphor for an album so preoccupied with lives unravelling from within. This is also where Hauppa’s unusual toolkit comes into focus. Kite guitar, a microtonal instrument, sits alongside synths, samples, vocoder and fretless guitar, and the resulting notes seem to fall between the cracks of familiar scales, giving everything a queasy, off-kilter quality.

Ensnarer’s Lament is aptly titled, a song about entrapment that feels suitably claustrophobic, its long, dragging passages owing as much to the funeral doom of Shape of Despair and Skepticism as to anything industrial. Hauppa’s vocals cut through the murk with real anguish here, giving voice to a character caught fast and unable to break free. It is a reminder that beneath the experimentation sits a deep love of the slowest and saddest end of heavy music.

Do No Harm carries a title that immediately evokes the oath taken by doctors, and in the hands of a story built on betrayal and broken trust it lands with a cruel irony. It is one of the darker turns on a record with no shortage of them, and the vocoder treatments add a cold, inhuman edge that suits it perfectly. It also showcases just how much ground one musician can cover, with Hauppa handling guitars, bass, drums, programming, and vocals himself.

Sins Of The Father is easily the album’s emotional core. Jonathon Hastings returns home after burying his father, only to uncover proof that Phillip was behind murders long whispered about, leaving him wrestling with grief and guilt, and with the dread that he has inherited far more than a surname. Musically the song tightens its grip bar by bar, the rhythms closing in until there is no air left before it gives way to a return of melodic motifs from across this album and earlier releases.

The Parting Glass shares its name with the traditional farewell song, and as the final full song before the closing interlude it feels like the point where the record finally begins to exhale. Hauppa has said he wanted the album to carry listeners through an in-between state and out the other side, and this is where that crossing nears completion. After so much torment, its arrival is a welcome release, and it is all the more powerful for having been so hard won.

Threaded throughout are Two, Three and Four, short, numbered pieces scattered across the running order that act as breathing spaces between the heavier chapters. Four closes the album, a quiet coda that leaves the story hanging in the air rather than tying it neatly together. Their placement is clever, never feeling like filler but instead acting as small chapter breaks that help pace what could otherwise be an overwhelming listen.

The real achievement here is how Hauppa builds each song around a character, letting what drives each one steer the music, so the album plays like a gallery of ruined lives rather than a set of tracks. The recurring motifs that tie it to Unwell, Pathways and his self-titled EP reward close attention, too. It is not an easy listen, nor is it meant to be, and the subject matter will rightly not be for everyone, but it is handled with weight and seriousness rather than shock value, and that care is what lifts it.

A harrowing, inventive and deeply affecting piece of cinematic doom that turns one man’s poisonous legacy into a chorus of lost voices. Liminal Spirit have made their most ambitious statement yet, and it lingers long after the final note fades.

For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.