Oct 17

Oct 17 Album Review : Primitive Man - Observance (2025)

The most philosophical question you can ask a metalhead is "what does heavy even means?" You’ll either get an answer made entirely of air-guitar chugging and grimacing, or you’ll be trapped in a ten-minute monologue that sounds like a lost Nietzsche essay written while wearing a battle vest because it means something slightly different for all of us and, technically, none of us are wrong. Whatever your definition of heavy might entail, it’s likely that Denver-based doom metal power trio Primitive Man checks it.

Their music is as loud as it is crushing. It’s as vast as it is angry. It’s the sound of rage metabolizing into meaning. They have a new album coming out called Observance and it’s everything I wanted it to be: familiarly oppressive and somehow more vigorous and volatile than ever before. It somehow makes you feel more alive by recognizing how close you’ve come to breaking.

Observance stretches across seven tracks that range from two to fourteen minutes, adding up to a colossal sixty-eight minutes of psychological excavation. Right from the first note, the album feels like it’s trying to claw its way out of something: your speakers, your skull, maybe even its own existence. The sound is massive, but not just in volume. It’s in the way the air seems to tense up around it.

There’s something different happening here. Ethan Lee McCarthy called it hope and I get where he’s coming from. Seer, the opener, feels like the soundtrack to someone fighting for their soul in real time. It’s all uncanny aggression and desperate propulsion, the sound of a man swimming upward through black water, lungs filling, refusing to accept that this might be it.

Devotion begins with a full ninety seconds of noise before kicking into the slow, anxious and suffocating pace that feels more familiar to Primitive Man’s music. It’s almost four minutes before you hear McCarthy’s wounded bear growl on this one.

The real heart of this song, though, belongs to drummer Joe Linden. Around the five-minute mark, he drops a pulse-pounding, perfectly measured transition, proving that atmosphere doesn’t always come from excess, but from restraint. The precision of those drums lays the groundwork for the song’s more psychedelic back half. It’s like watching a storm cloud expand in slow motion: menacing, hypnotic, impossible to look away from. This is more of a classic Primitive Man cut, but it’s extremely satisfying nonetheless.

The second-longest track, Transactional, is T-E-N-S-E in the way a fever dream is tense. Listening to it feels like trying to navigate a labyrithn while your body slowly shuts down from a venomous bite. The edges blur, every collision hurts, but the pain starts to feel strangely theoretical. Ethan McCarthy’s filthy, abrasive guitar swirl like toxic smoke over the plodding rhythm section until you realize you’ve stopped breathing in sync with it.

Iron Sights follows as a brief noise interlude, slicing the record cleanly in two. It’s a dividing line, not just between tracks, but also between expectations. The first half gives you everything you thought you wanted from Primitive Man: obliteration, despair, gravity. The second half? It’s something else entirely. Observance is, improbably, backloaded, saving its deepest revelations for when you’re already too far gone to resist.

So yeah, we need to talk about Natural Law. What a fucking song. Everything you thought you understood about Primitive Man gets dragged past its logical limit: volume, aggression, volatility, sadness. Sure, they’ve written faster, more grindcore leaning cuts before. But this? This feels new. If their earlier sound was a bulldozer of despair, Natural Law is that same bulldozer skidding down a muddy slope, trying to flatten a well-deserved target and losing traction the entire way. It’s chaos, but righteous chaos.

Fun fact: the first time I heard Natural Law, I was at work. An ex-colleague stopped by to say hi and tossed a fucking Labubu (don’t ask) at me to get my attention. I was so deep in the song that when it hit me, I flinched and yelped like I just got shot by a gun. That’s how far Natural Law pulled me under. I think it might be my new favorite Primitive Man song. It’s a journey through everything that’s wrong and you manage to survive each time.

The other single from Observance Social Contract isn’t as immediately pissed off as Natural Law, but it might be Primitive Man’s most singular composition to date. The first half of its majestic ten-minute sprawl is haunted by a strange clapping sound, probably Joe Linden striking the rim of his snare, though it feels less like percussion and more like someone knocking from the other side of a wall. Beneath that, Jonathan Campos delivers some of the moodiest, most atmospheric bass work he’s ever recorded to rambling, chaotic vocals that feels like sampling? But that’s only the first half.

The rhythm section is the monster that carries Social Contract through the dark corridors of Ethan Lee McCarthy’s mind. That song is so freakin’ good, it would stand its own as an instrumental. Seriously, Joe Linden could write books on how to enhance songs with drums. He’s so fucking good and his work never calls attention to itself. It’s always in sync with the atmosphere any given song. These three guys are so ridiculously attuned to one another, it feels almost surreal on Observance.

Water isn’t the best song on Observance, nor is it the weakest. It’s the one that feels like an ending: heavy, dramatic, and unstable in a way that suggests something unfinished, something still growing. The track is busier and more psychotic than what we usually expect from Primitive Man, a psychedelic descent that sounds less like a conclusion and more like an opening to whatever they’re becoming next. These guys have come a long since Scorn and they’re still finding new paths to explore.

I have nothing negative to say about Observance. It’s Primitive Man’s most complete statement yet. Their strongest, most mature, and most spiritually aligned record to date. Everything about it feels relevant to the psychic static of right now, to the general sense that the world is simultaneously burning and repeating itself. McCarthy, Campos, and Linden have somehow found a way to raise the bar on themselves, which feels like defying gravity when you’re already buried underground.

Observance is the sound of catharsis in an age where catharsis doesn’t work anymore. This is the record you’ll reach for when the noise of a burning world matches the noise within. On October 31st, it’s coming for all of us and no one’s ready, least of all you.