Oct 10

Oct 10 Album Review : Author & Punisher - Nocturnal Birding (2025)

Industrial music was never meant for human consumption. It’s the sonic equivalent of eating a handful of screws because you wanted to feel something real. By design, it’s cold, mechanical, and deliberately unpleasant, an auditory mirror to the buffet of social, technological, and emotional disconnections offered by modern life. If it sounds like a dying microwave, that’s not a flaw; that’s the thesis.

But genres evolve, and industrial, like everything else humanity touches, has started to leak feelings. There are human voices now in the machinery: cracked, terrified, sometimes almost tender. The machine learned to scream back. One of the most interesting voices in this evolution belongs to San Diego mechanical engineer turned sonic mad scientist Tristan Shone, better known as Author & Punisher. His instruments are self-built contraptions of metal and circuitry, equal parts torture device and transcendence machine.

The end product is usually called industrial metal, but that term feels like labeling a black hole as "kind of dark." After the relative introspection of Krüller in 2022, his new album Nocturnal Birding reboots the apocalypse, louder, more heartbroken and somehow even more human.

On Nocturnal Birding, Author & Punisher compresses the end of the world into thirty-four minutes of apocalyptic majesty. Eight songs that sound like tectonic plates negotiating a peace treaty. Galaxy-forming detonations collide with cold, foreboding synths and the titular nocturnal bird chants. It’s a cinematic odyssey I don’t fully understand (maybe no one’s supposed to)but I feel it somewhere between my bloodstream and my bone marrow.

It’s not angry music. It’s not sad music. It’s something stranger: a melancholy for a planet that’s already gone, or maybe one that never existed in the first place.

Author & Punisher’s music has always been hard to categorize but impossible to mistake. It’s uniquely his, yet engineered with the precision of someone who could probably build a death ray if you left him alone in a Radio Shack long enough. Nocturnal Birding isn’t a copy of Beastland and certainly not of Krüller, but they coexist like chapters from the same haunted instruction manual. What separates this one, at least to my ears, is the tension between digital and organic sound. The mechanical heartbeat now competing with something that feels almost alive. And then, of course, the bird chants. You can’t ignore the bird chants.

It’s also the most guitar-driven Author & Punisher record yet (I think), and you can feel producer Will Putney’s fingerprints all over that. The riffs glow with this molten, incandescent quality, like they were forged in a lab accident that somehow went right. A song like Titmouse (what the hell, Tristan? What does it even mean?) could almost pass for sludge metal. It’s groovy, dramatic, and combative in a way that feels almost alien to Author & Punisher’s past work. So, this is new. Sort of.

I don’t know what Tristan Shone’s newfound fascination with birds is about, but it’s a fascinating organic counterpoint to his brand of digital chicanery. Nocturnal Birding flutters between the natural and the synthetic like a broken ecosystem trying to reboot itself.

A track like Mute Swan, featuring Megan Osztrosits (who, full disclosure, I have no idea what else she does), captures this friction perfectly: gulls crying over brooding synths while Author & Punisher does what he does best: slam electronic machinery into other electronic machinery until it sounds like catharsis. The result isn’t quite cinematic; it’s more like a repressed memory trying to give you an anxiety attack. A memory from that planet you're not sure even existed, but that keeps haunting you Total Recall style.

Another high point on the record is Titanis, featuring KUNTARI, an Indonesian self-styled primalcore artist who makes experimental music out of tribal rhythms and sheer nerve. It’s one of the album’s more explosive moments, a sonic collision where nature and machine don’t so much coexist as detonate against each other. The follow-up, Rook ushers the record’s final phase on a doomier, more traditional Author & Punisher note, a kind of slow-motion apocalypse that feels both climactic and inevitable.

It’s the perfect soaring note for an album this conflicted and expansive, where every mechanical scream and organic cry folds back into the same bleak conclusion: that progress always wins, even when it shouldn’t.

There aren’t any outright duds on Nocturnal Birding, but a few tracks feel less daring than the rest. The opener Meadowlark starts with an intriguing slow build, only to settle into more familiar Author & Punisher territory halfway through. I would’ve preferred a quieter, more ethereal introduction, something that let the tension breathe before the inevitable descent into digital punishment. Because even if that percussive overload is his signature, not everything needs to end like a robot having a panic attack.

Titmice, which follows Titmouse (I don’t even want to know what’s going on at this point), might be thematically relevant but feels redundant. It’s long, too. That’s the occupational hazard of having a sound this distinct: repetition comes for you sooner than you think. When your identity is that strong, every echo risks sounding like déjà vu. As it is good practice with experimental music Nocturnal Birding explores the limits of of what’s possible and it's normal to hit a wall here and there.

The important to to power through and powering through things is Author & Punisher’s MO.

Nocturnal Birding is the same, but different. It’s Author & Punisher slamming his digital fury against the might of a ravenous nature trying to take its place back. And it works. It’s crushing, but not one-note. Brutal, but with a pulse. There’s something almost spiritual in that friction. The machine screaming to feel alive again.

If I could make a request, I’d love to see Tristan Shone step back and play with space and time as variables in his music. Maybe even build a few new instruments while he’s at it, because why the hell not? Who’s going to stop him? We already know how percussive he can be. Now I’m ready for him to get dramatic.