Jun 11

Jun 11 Album Review : Steve Von Till - Alone in a World of Wounds (2025)

The first Neurosis album I ever listened to was A Sun That Never Sets, and about three songs in, I told myself: "This is terrible I'll never listen to this band again," and for a couple of years, I didn’t. But life has a way of circling back to the things that matter. A couple years ago, I watched a video where their singer Steve Von Till shared his 11 favorite non-metal albums and they were so great, it kickstarted a reconciliation project with Neurosis that’s still ongoing.

His new solo album Alone in a World of Wounds is an important step in this process for it is some of the best music I've ever heard for men who refuse to go to therapy.

Alone in a World of Wounds runs eight songs and forty-one minutes, but it’s so lyrically, thematically, and sonically cohesive that talking about it in terms of "tracks" feels weirdly clinical, like trying to rank the individual bricks in a crumbling church. It’s more of a haunted panorama: an intimate monument to internal ruin, where everything progresses with the logic of a long, sleepless night. It's one of these albums where you have to look at the whole portrait.

Every song is slow, elegiac, and steeped in a kind of melancholia that doesn't feel performative. They also all kind of sound the same, which, let’s be honest, is probably the whole idea. Grief doesn’t have movements. It just lingers until you forget what silence used to sound like.

This night walk through a haunted town begins with The Corpse Road, all brittle strings and what sounds like (very) spare, muted trumpet. Von Till sings about finding the courage “to dream it all again” in the shadow of fear, suffering, and the unknown. But as strong as the lyrics are, it’s the bluesy texture of his voice that really carries the weight. It doesn’t just deliver the message. It is the message.

That cracked, earth-heavy tone offers a sobering counterpoint to the Nick Cave-like dramatic instrumentation, grounding the song’s ghostliness in something human and hurt.

On Watch Them Fade, Von Till clings to those same fragile dreams, even as they fray under the weight of exhaustion and accumulated pain. The track’s lingering piano and spare percussion give it a slow, organic pulse, like a heartbeat stubbornly pushing through grief. Horizons Undone shifts focus to the idea of fatality. Not in the theatrical, metal sense, but in the quiet realization that something inside you has snapped.

There’s a vivid image here: being submerged, watching the surface recede, and still refusing to accept that you’re drowning. The blend of strings and subtle electronic textures gives this vision an eerie, almost dissociative quality as if your body understood what's happening to you before your mind does.

Distance feels like a song about redemption or maybe just the calm that comes with accepting your own past, flaws and all. Von Till declares he doesn’t believe in sin and refuses to be "weighted down by dark matter,” which feels less like defiance and more like liberation. The muted trumpet returns here, but it’s more expansive this time, giving the track a kind of funeral grandeur. The bluesy, elegiac drums lend weight without drama.

There’s a quiet declaration of intent in this song: Von Till steps away from the static of the world. Not angrily, not bitterly, but with clarity. He’s no longer wrestling with solitude. He’s chosen it.

Calling Down the Darkness is the longest track on Alone in a World of Wounds, clocking in at nearly eight minutes. It’s another meditation on resisting the inevitability of death. Von Till sings about having taken a poison willingly, like a man trying to make peace with the end, but by the closing lines he’s singing to the rising sun and "the shining ones" as if some part of him still believes in transcendence, or at least endurance.

The arrangement is stark: spare piano, minimal electronics, and a creeping atmosphere that recalls William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops. I don’t know if Von Till meant to reference Basinski, but the connection feels right. Both artists linger inside decay, not to romanticize it, but to understand it from the inside. This is where the whole album starts to clarify itself. Alone in a World of Wounds isn’t just about suffering. It's about resisting the slow accumulation of decay that comes with age, heartbreak, and the quiet realization that no one’s coming to save you.

What follows is the album’s shortest track, The Dawning of the Day (Insomnia). Von Till shifts into spoken word, pondering what a new day might hold, if anything. Old-school country strings hover beside a dramatic piano line, while his voice cycles through a series of quiet questions. There’s an urgency here that feels foundational, as if he’s always carried it, even in sleep. Old Bent Pine comes next, and it’s literally about resting about leaning against an old, bent pine tree and letting yourself stop running.

It’s the first real moment of peace on the record, and maybe the one he had to fight the hardest to reach. I think it’s my favorite track, both lyrically and sonically. There’s a haunting synth line that seems to watch over the music, while lingering guitar chords float like fireflies over a battlefield. It’s the first time on the album where light and darkness aren’t in opposition. They just coexist, equally spent and equally sacred.

The final track, River of No Return, finds Von Till comparing his mind to a river, very much in the pre-Socratic sense: something you can’t step into twice, because it’s never the same river, and you’re never the same person. He sings about his evolving relationship to himself, his doubts, his certainties, and the strange peace that comes from realizing that every decision, good or bad, led him here. And maybe that’s not such a terrible place to be.

It’s the closest thing to a country ballad on the record, without actually being one. Haunted guitars, solemn violins, and what feels like a shitload of ghosts drift through the mix. But by the end, those ghosts don’t seem threatening. They seem familiar. Like he’s learned to live with them.

Steve Von Till’s Metal Archives page claims his solo project was originally intended to be folk in the vein of Neil Young. But Alone in a World of Wounds doesn’t sound like either of those things. If anything, it sounds like what Nick Cave might’ve become if he’d grown up in New Orleans, surrounded by decay, ritual, and heat instead of gothic Anglican dread. This album kind of sneaked up on me. I didn’t expect to return to it as often as I have, but I do. It lingers. It asks for patience, and then it gives something back.

Always give artists more than one listen. You don’t want to miss something this quietly special. This record won’t fix you, but it’ll sit beside you while you don’t get better and honestly, that’s more than most people do.