Sep 5

Sep 5 Album Review : Reaper's Gong - Euphoric Purification (2025)

Metal culture has a very weird and specific double standard for creative innovation. Change your main band’s sound and you’ve committed heresy. For example, In Flames basically burned down Babylon when they decided they’d rather be mall rockers than melodic death metal royalty. But side projects? Total diplomatic immunity. Fenriz once recorded what basically sounds like R2D2 doing ketamine in a planetarium with Neptune Towers and everyone nodded politely because it wasn’t a Darkthrone record.

That’s just how metalhead logic works. We don't question it, because deep down it does make sense, even if it shouldn’t.

Full of Hell never really had to play by those rules. Their entire career has been a steady mutation, justified by the fact that they just kept getting better at their instruments. Still, guitarist and riffing shaman Spencer Hazard spun off Reaper’s Gong, a sludgy noise rock outlet built on the same restless philosophy but painted in different tones. Their upcoming EP Euphoric Purification feels like a fresh permutation of the same urge: muscular, expansive, and way more intricate than sludge has any right to be.

Euphoric Purification clocks in at five songs and just under twenty minutes, the sweet spot where an album still feels substantial but you can play it twice before the pizza guy shows up. Hazard told me last spring that a lineup shake-up briefly detoured the project; what was meant to be a Reaper’s Gong record ended up mutating into a surprise Full of Hell EP instead. But the DNA stayed intact. This new EP keeps the same riff-first, sandpaper aggression, only more textured and expansive.

It’s a departure, but not quite a reinvention: evolutionary, not revolutionary.

This is, predictably, a very muscular record, featuring guitar riffs that coil and climb over you like something alive. Reaper’s Gong has figured out the use of repetition without ever sounding redundant. The riffs stab, circle back, stab again, obsessive but never dull. Every song either ratchets the tension upward or drops into a carefully measured lull, the kind that feels less like a break and more like a threat. That push-pull gives the whole thing its urgency and it’s why the riffs don’t just exist as sound.

They actually land with emotional weight. As it is often the case in Spencer Hazard’s projects, guitars act as another form of vocals.

The album’s two sharpest blades are All That Decay and the closer, Furnace Unending. All That Decay moves slower, dragging its feet in a way that’s almost shoegaze but too nervous to ever drift off. Alex Oatman’s drumming doesn’t let you relax, it’s steady, hammering, like footsteps following you. Even when the guitars stretch into long, smeared lines, that pulse keeps the track clenched.

Zoe Koch’s vocals cut through: distorted, mournful, carrying the doomed determination of someone walking into a fight they already know they’ll lose. You feel it in your shoulders, the way you tense up before something bad actually happens.

That tragic undertow running through Euphoric Purification finally breaches the surface on Furnace Unending. It’s a small detail, but the brief, moody guitar passage foreshadowing the climactic tension past the first minutes is one of my favorite moments on the record. It feels like holding your breath as you brace for impact. It’s the kind of kinetic feeling Reaper’s Gong are able to evoke on this new record. It’s sludgy and abrasive, but it’s clever details like this that makes it hum.

Of course, Euphoric Purification has its noisy side too. The lineup shift added a second guitarist, and you can hear the extra chaos most clearly on Dead Man. It’s the kind of track where the band sounds like they're physically trying to break their instruments. That blunt-force approach is one of heavy music’s underrated joys : you hear the glitches, the scrapes, the ugly feedback, and it gives the song a pulse that feels genuinely pissed off. It’s not the most intricate cut, but it’s the rawest and that counts for something.

Chain Link is wired with nervous energy: aggressive, twitchy, but threaded with little clever turns that keep it from being pure bludgeon. It commands your attention before clearing the lane for the more emotionally heavy hitters later on the EP. Spiral Cypress is carried by Zoe Koch’s voice in a performance that teeters between spoken word clarity and a nervous breakdown. The guitars often step back here, not dominating but shaping the space, laying down texture so those vocal detonations can land clean.

It’s a smart setup for Furnace Unending and it makes the final blow hit that much harder.

Euphoric Purification delivers exactly what it promises: sludgy, sharp-edged noise rock with enough muscle and heart to matter. What sets it apart is how direct it feels. Too many bands in this lane bury themselves under irony or code-breaking riffs meant only for other musicians. Reaper’s Gong avoids that trap entirely. They’ve locked onto one atmosphere, one mood, and ridden it with absolute conviction. It’s heavy without being hollow, intricate without being precious.

And really, that’s the point, this isn’t some half-baked side project, it’s another fully realized extension of Spencer Hazard’s restless creativity and it is deserving of your time and ears. It’ll be made available next week on September 12, from Damien Records.