Jul 22

Jul 22 Album Review : Matt Jencik & Midwife - Never Die (2025)

My favorite things in life often are the ones I didn’t even know I wanted. On my first viewing of Hereditary, I didn’t even know you could use intergenerational trauma as a narrative superstructure to what is essentially folk horror with a contemporary twist. I was blissfully ignorant of my love for corrupted cops and angry white man hating one another in literature until I stumbled upon the works of James Ellroy. That’s part of the deal, right? You don’t know what you want until it quietly ruins you.

I did not know that I needed an unclassifiable drone, slowcore, shoegaze album that made me feel "melancholy in the abstract" until I heard Matt Jencik & Miwdife’s new collaborative record Never Die, but now it’s here, and it’s rewired something. You might not be looking for it either but trust me, it's about to become part of your life whether you're ready or not.

Never Die is ten songs and forty-four minutes of music that sounds like something you're not sure you've dreamt about. It’s an immersive, out-of-body journey that slowly unfolds in textures and layers like you’re being gently pulled through an abandoned transit system between life and whatever comes after. It's mostly guitars, synths, and Madeline Johnston’s voice, part hymn, part malfunctioning weather report, melting into one another until you’re no longer sure where the sound ends and your own dread begins.

The closest I can come to describing it is this: it’s like floating in a soft, colorless void while some unseen forces quietly debate what to do with you.

It’s tough to pick a favorite track on Never Die, but September Goths stands out as one of the more "conventional" pleasures. The obsessive electronic drums, coupled with retro synths, pull you into a hypnotic space where place and time dissolve like an idea you’ve just forgotten. As Madeline Johnston sings about something that sounds like a car accident, the synths layer into a kinetic finale that does its best to scramble your already-uncertain reality.

By the end, it’s not just about what you’re hearing, it’s about what you’re feeling. It forces a melancholy on you that doesn’t belong, but now that it’s here, you can’t shake it off.

The opener Delete Key sets the tone with dungeon synth-like drones that sound like they were recorded on the roof of a haunted monastery at midnight. Johnston’s voice slowly bleeds through, hovering over stretched chords that outlast their own meaning. You forget what notes are supposed to do. She’s singing about leaving a toxic relationship, but it feels less like an exit and more like waking up from a half-life. It’s an appropriately disorienting start to a record that never wants you to find your footing.

There’s also Organ Delay (a standalone instrumental) buzzes with such otherworldly energy it feels like Brian Eno wrote it from beyond the veil, possibly using Morse code and a broken Ouija board (he would totally do that). It’s ambient music, technically. But it’s haunted ambient. Grief rendered as texture. A synthscape you don’t walk through so much as sink into.

Only Death Is Real is another standout on Never Die, mostly because it pulls off something few songs even attempt: using guitar as emotional punctuation instead of the main event. It barely exist, it’s a ghostly flicker in the background, but it somehow makes everything heavier. It’s one of the most subtle and precise uses of guitar I’ve heard in recent memory.

Instead of leading the charge, it hangs back and underlines the weight of the depression Midwife is whispering about, with just a hint of delightful, almost-smirking clarity: the metalheads were right/only death is real. The synths are stripped down to the bone, more like embodied tension than actual melody.

There are more shoegaze-adjacent tracks here, Flower Dragon and Bend, for instance, that don’t hit quite as hard for me as the ambient, ghoulish-folk stuff. But even in those moments, Matt Jencik resists the genre’s usual instinct to flatten you with 2000$ worth of distortion pedals.

The guitars are still stretched out and skeletal, like they’re being reluctantly coaxed into existence. Still, I think Jencik and Midwife are at their best when they’re pulling apart the very idea of what a song is supposed to be. Structure becomes vapor. Melody turns ghost. It’s music that feels like it was composed for that thin sliver of time after your last breath, when you’re waiting to find out if you’re going anywhere.

I could sit here and break down the specifics of every track on Never Die, but that almost misses the point. This is an album that listens like a midnight walk through a forgotten graveyard, each song seeping into the next, creating a murky, primordial dream state for you to explore, if you dare. It’s better when you don’t focus too hard on the mechanics or the intent. Just let the atmosphere take over. This is music meant for walking home alone at night, or passing quietly through places you were never supposed to find.

There’s a fine line between synergy and compromise. Matt Jencik and Madeline Johnston disassemble one another’s musical DNA and rewire it into something strange, spectral, and deeply affecting. What emerges isn’t just a blend of styles, but a new, free-floating language of grief and atmosphere. Their darkest feelings drift across this album like ghosts searching for somewhere to haunt and the place they end up is your chest cavity. Never Die is singular. It’s unsettling. And I can’t stop listening to it.