Aug 5

Aug 5 Album Review : Stomach - Low Demon (2025)

Sludge metal isn’t a genre so much as a spiritual condition. It’s music for people who want to dissolve inside the ugliest, most ungodly sounds ever carved from distortion, pessimism, and broken gear. It doesn’t invite you in so much as it absorbs you, like a spontaneous vision during a heatstroke. Fighting the sludge is a rookie mistake. It will smother you. But if you stop resisting, if you let it nestle inside your chest like a second beating heart, you might discover something better than peace. You might feel invincible.

These were the kinds of thoughts I had while listening to Low Demon, the new album from Stomach: a doom-sludge duo featuring John Hoffman of Weekend Nachos and another guy named Adam Tomlinson. While I've greatly enjoyed the nasty and abstract pleasures of their first album Parasite, this is a different beast. Low Demon has ideas and scope. The kind that make you wonder if the band is trying to summon something, or just trying to let that something bleed out of their system.

Low Demon clocks in at five tracks and forty-three minutes of music, which is about as close as you’ll get to a golden ratio of pain in sludge metal. It’s the kind of runtime that feels manageable going in, but by the end will have you questioning whether time is still linear. The songs stretch anywhere from four and a half minutes to a whopping seventeen-plus and none of them behave the way traditional songs do.

They’re nasty, often formless, and performed at such ungodly volume that you hear the actual vibration of the amps. The best way I can describe it is this: imagine the soundtrack to an ultra-violent, haunted Takashi Miike film, interpreted live by Primitive Man in a room where no one is entirely sure what year it is or who they even are anymore.

The opener Dredge isn’t really a song in the traditional sense. It’s more like a Liege of Inveracity slam riff moment reimagined for the doom/sludge continuum. A single, knuckle-dragging idea stretched into slow, agonizing infinity. You keep waiting for the song to start, but it never does. Faint vocals. Almost no shift. Just pressure. It leaves you simmering in this crackling, subterranean tension for over four minutes, like you’re stuck in a standoff with the devil himself, except he’s not talking. He's just breathing heavily and tapping on something metal in the dark.

I’d listen to entire records of this kind of purposeful, evocative drone. It’s philosophically minimalist, sure, but it also feels huge and hostile. There’s a terrifying cinematic quality to it, like the score to a horror movie that never lets you see the monster. Only the aftermath.

Bastard Scum (seriously, what a perfect title) is a punishing, lumbering beast in the tradition of Primitive Man. It’s a prolonged, deliberate bludgeoning where John Hoffman hurls "CRUELTY IS GOOOOD" over and over like he’s trying to convince both you and himself that empathy was just a phase. As it ends, the song fizzles into several minutes of feedback-drenched limbo, where slow, predatory riffs creep in like they’re foreshadowing an attack you’ll never see coming.

It uncoils at its own pace, wrapping itself around you like an anaconda made of power chords and intent. Eight and a half minutes of dread, and not the theatrical kind. The real kind. Bastard Scum is a testament to the strange things that pure volume and brute force can make you feel. Not just anger or catharsis, but also fear, reverence, and maybe even guilt for enjoying it so much.

Get Through Winter is a different kind of ordeal. One that occasionally flirts with grindcore just to remind you that speed can be horrifying too in the proper context. Hoffman and Tomlinson ratchet up the tempo just long enough to give you hope before crushing it back down to a chaotic, gurgling crawl. Over and over. It’s like watching the villain in a slasher film catch up to the final survivors and instead of ending it, he's slowly torturing them for fun.

The back half of the track feels like a slow-motion celebration of death and decay, a funereal victory lap. Hoffman howls his visions of failure like someone recounting a dream they never woke up from. It’ll rattle your bones and not with fear, exactly. More like resignation. This is what happens when winter wins.

Oscillate dips back into grindcore, but only briefly, just long enough to rip open another hole in your nervous system. About forty seconds of pure speed and panic, and then… nothing. Or at least nothing you can name. The track dissolves into an all-encompassing, pulsating nightmare that barely moves, yet feels suffocatingly alive. For several minutes, it just hovers there, crackling with feedback, resisting resolution. Like an abandoned spacecraft drifting past a dead planet, haunted by whatever happened in the silence.

For my money, this is the song that nails Stomach’s predatory crawl better than anything else on Low Demon. There’s a groove buried deep in its stillness: odd, haunted, almost seductive. It feels weirdly out of place, but in a way that makes the rest of the album feel even more hostile by comparison. Like the monster has started to enjoy the chase and they're expecting you to enjoy it too.

Shivers // Drafts is technically two songs or maybe just one with multiple personalities, both of them unstable. It’s the kind of track that only works at full volume. Anything less and you lose it to the swamp: the sound, the feedback, the slow-motion collapse of structure into atmosphere.

What I love most here is how Hoffman and Tomlinson bury these simple and theatrical rock riffs inside the sludge. Not melodic exactly, but familiar enough to feel like echoes of a world you used to know. Only now they’ve been stretched out, downtuned, and disfigured, like memories returning in nightmare form. Things that should feel safe suddenly don’t. There’s something deeply unsettling about that.

As a closer, Shivers // Drafts doesn’t offer catharsis or climax, it just drags the album’s body out to the woods and leaves it there. Not with violence, but with a kind of reverence. Like it knows the damage is done.

I’m not gonna lie: Low Demon is my favorite album of 2025 so far. It’s unlike anything else happening in sludge right now: weird, expansive, and humming with a kind of untapped potential that feels both intuitive and cinematic. There’s something here that goes beyond heaviness. It feels like a deconstruction of composition itself (DEcomposition?). The songs are long, counterintuitive and unholy scaffoldings that ooze with contradiction: rage and restraint, decay and control, structure and chaos.

It’s definitely not for every ears. But if you’re into haunted music that hurts as much as it heals, but also that creeps, crushes, and conjures, Low Demon is top of the line.