Album Review : High on Fire - Cometh the Storm (2024)
Although "getting high and playing guitar" sounds like the kind of catastrophic life strategy a concerned parent might overhear in a strip-mall food court, Matt Pike has somehow alchemized it into a functioning career. He’s the rare musician whose entire existence feels like a bar-fight folktale: a man forged out of nicotine, wizard lore, and whatever chemical compound makes distortion pedals sound like tectonic plates grinding together.
Pike has never been what medical professionals would call healthy, but the strange truth is that his longevity proves something borderline unscientific. He's the living embodiment that kicking ass is better for you than any diet know to man.
At this point, every High on Fire album feels like a long-running experiment in cosmic continuity. Their output has the same reliability as Motörhead’s. Listening to High on Fire has never been about redefining boundaries; it’s about living as ferociously as possible within them. They have remained a uniquely belligerent source of pleasure over the years. The sonic equivalent of shotgunning a beer during a thunderstorm and believing this somehow blesses the harvest.
But Cometh the Storm complicates that narrative. There’s an extra gear here, an escalation that feels almost unfair for a band this deep into their lifespan. Pike, Jeff Matz, and new drummer Coady Willis tap into a venom that drains out of them like the last, panicked convulsions of a wounded creature trying to outrun its own mortality. This record hits differently, like discovering your reliable drinking buddy has secretly been training for a bare-knuckle tournament and decides to show you on a random Tuesday.
This isn’t High on Fire evolving. It’s High on Fire remembering something primal they didn’t realize they’d forgotten.
Cometh the Storm sprawls across eleven songs and fifty-seven minutes of unbroken hostility, a length that feels less like an artistic decision and more like a dare. It’s as long as it is intense, a full-body endurance test where Pike, Matz, and Willis barrel down a winding, poorly lit highway at a speed that should, by all logical metrics, result in a fiery crash. But it never does. They hold the line through some unspoken combination of stamina, instinct, and that mystical rock ’n’ roll bravado that only kicks in once the rational brain has exited the vehicle.
The songs veer wildly in size: from radio-suspect two-and-a-half-minute shock blasts to a ten-minute monolith that feels like a slow-motion brawl with the weather. What binds it all is the way they expel their pent-up energy with such violent clarity that seeps into your DNA. By the time it’s over, you’re vibrating at their frequency, like you’ve been drafted into someone else’s adrenaline cycle without being asked.
So what exactly is the secret additive that turns Cometh the Storm into an all-you-can-eat buffet of cosmic savagery? My best guess (and it’s the kind of guess you arrive at only after sitting with the album long enough to feel your pulse syncing to its BPM) is that it’s imperceptibly slower than their previous work. Just a hair. A fraction. The kind of microscopic shift you wouldn’t detect unless you’ve lived with this band long enough to sense when Pike is bending time instead of string tension.
And that tiny deceleration changes the entire emotional architecture. Instead of High on Fire’s usual blitzkrieg ,riffs flying past like you’re watching the album from the passenger seat of a speeding car, the aggression hangs in the air and then swarms you, like a thundercloud deciding it has personal business with your day. Groovier, heavier, more gravitational. It hits not because it moves fast, but because it refuses to move out of your way.
The production from Kurt Ballou doubles down on this effect. It’s pristine without being polite, cinematic without sacrificing grime. The kind of sound that feels engineered to communicate omnipotence. Everything lands bigger and meaner, as if the band collectively realized that leaning into a punch can be more devastating than throwing the perfect haymaker. It’s not exactly a new formula; it’s the same formula tweaked for maximum impact, like they finally learned how to weaponize inertia.
My favorite track (by a margin so wide it feels almost unethical) is the utterly infectious Tristmegistus, where Matt Pike gets so amped he stops bothering with language entirely. The words collapse, the vowels disintegrate, and he just groans his aggression into the microphone like a strongman hoisting a concrete barrel in front of a crowd that may or may not be cheering. And here’s the part I can’t fully quantify: it’s bizarrely relatable.
There’s something deeply, embarrassingly universal about that sound. Every man I know has this internal pressure chamber , a kind of unarticulated, prehistoric voltage, that society gives you absolutely no sanctioned outlet for. Tristmegistus manifests that outlet. It’s a raw, unfiltered exorcism of the exact kind of emotional thunder we pretend not to feel, delivered with such dramatic clarity that it accidentally creates a safe space for all of us who recognize that noise in ourselves.
Speaking of dramatic, the title track hits with the rolling, tectonic force of a war chant. The bass drums tumble forward like an army walking on, the guitars buzz with that monolithic inevitability High on Fire summons when they are feeling themselves. And there’s the quiet parts. Those brief, deceptive lulls, only exist to make the loud parts explode with enough voltage to jolt you upright whether you consent to the moment or not.
I’ve never been a lyrics-first listener, but even I can’t ignore what Pike is doing here. The call to arms, the fatalistic self-awareness, the simplicity that borders on prophecy , it all drills into you with this blunt, vicious clarity that bypasses interpretation entirely. You don’t think about it; you respond to it. Eliciting that reaction constantly is High on Fire's superpower as a band. The song basically forces you to beat your chest like you’re preparing for combat in a conflict you didn’t realize you’d enlisted in.
Hunting Shadows is the kind of curveball you don’t expect this deep into Cometh the Storm. It’s still powerful, still built from the same raw materials that make High on Fire sound like a prehistoric engine firing back to life, but it eases off the mammoth riffs just enough to reveal something almost shocking: it’s catchy. Not in the conventional, radio-friendly sense, but in that peculiar way certain heavy songs become memorable because they feel like they’re circling the same emotional target with deliberate obsession.
Even at nearly six minutes, it carries a rock sensibility I didn’t know the band had access to. Pike’s vocals take on this anthemic, declarative shape, while the songwriting loops and coils around itself like a ritual being performed at full volume. It’s another example of their signature high/low art fusion, where barbaric volume intersects with unexpectedly poetic intention. Pike doesn’t so much sing here as he recites a long-form incantation to Earth-shattering amplification, turning the whole track into a sermon delivered through a wall of amplifiers.
Burning Down is another skull-splitting Iommi invocation, the kind of riff architecture that feels like a ceremonial door-kicking. It storms straight into your mind and whatever portion of your soul remains unscorched by the previous tracks. It may not be as thematically rich as Tristmegistus or the title song, but the way the drums command the space , combined with those feral, high-altitude solos , practically dares you to challenge gravity for the duration of its runtime.
It’s a physical song, the sort that forces your posture to change.
And then there’s Lightning Beard. Yes, that is really the title, and honestly it tells you everything you need to know before a single note plays. It’s the unrelenting post-apocalyptic sky-pirate anthem none of us realized we were missing from our emotional vocabulary. Fast, gnarly, decisive and mercifully brief. As the second shortest track on Cometh the Storm, it hits like a quick, concentrated blast of chaos and then disappears before you’ve fully processed what just happened. It’s the musical equivalent of being mugged by a weather system.
There’s also a track called The Beating, which is one of those titles that eliminates the need for metaphor. It’s a Snakes-on-a-Plane proposition: you already know exactly what emotional pit you’re stepping into. The song tears forward with this fast-and-loose Motörhead velocity, except someone has replaced Lemmy’s Budweiser with a litre of unprocessed rage. It’s over almost before it begins (more event than composition) and it slingshots perfectly into Tough Guy, a track that feels like the elongated aftershock of its predecessor rather than a standalone moment.
Tough Guy isn’t bad; it’s just… predictable, especially on an album where even the familiar tropes have been hitting with unexpected force. These two songs would’ve slotted in seamlessly on a previous High on Fire record, but here they feel like late additions, functional, necessary, maybe even inevitable, but lacking the sharpened, blacked-out clarity that defines the rest of Cometh the Storm. They do their job, just not at the same evolutionary altitude as the giants surrounding them.
Speaking of functional songs, the instrumental Karanlik Yol (which they’ve been using as their walk-on music) cuts the album cleanly in half and reloads it like a gun. It’s basically three minutes of coiled tension: slick, winding cithara lines that keep building pressure without ever letting it blow. That’s the real magic trick of Cometh the Storm. Even the interludes feel wired with this pre-apocalyptic charge that makes your blood jump a little, like you’re bracing for something you can’t dodge. But instead of telling you to hide, the track squares your shoulders. It gets you ready for whatever impact is coming next.
This review is already too long, and I could still talk your ear off about the rest of it: the gruff, doomy closer Darker Fleece, the actual album opener Lambsbread, the punishing Sol’s Golden Curse. They all rule. This whole album rules. Cometh the Storm feels like the soundtrack to the inner war every metalhead is fighting inside their ribcage, but it also makes you want to fight it out loud. It’s less a collection of songs and more a spell , one where the intent behind each note outweighs the technical value of the note itself. Pike’s feral energy doesn’t just guide the record; it haunts it, in the best way possible.
High on Fire has always been easy to shorthand : a straightforward, face-first metal band, the same way Motörhead is "just Motörhead.” But every one of their albums carries its own color, its own atmosphere, its own pressure system built around Pike’s riffs. And on Cometh the Storm, that atmosphere feels like courage under collapsing circumstances. Integrity when the options narrow. The kind of resolve that feels both doomed and righteous at the same time. Honestly, I don’t think anything is more metal than that.
I totally missed this record when it came out last year. Consider this my overdue tribute to Matt Pike: guitarist, warlord, walking bolt of electricity. May he live as long and prosper as Ozzy.
8.9/10
* Follow me on Instagram and Bluesky to keep up with new posts *
