Feb 17

Feb 17 Album Review : Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean - Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On

The most popular songs in the world are engineered to be understood in under fifteen seconds. They’re catchy, harmonized within an inch of their lives and lyrically vague enough that you can pour your own trauma into them like cheap vodka into a Solo cup. You don’t have to do any work to appreciate them.

Nothing about the music of Massachusetts sludge-metal nihilists Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean can be understood under fifteen seconds. I don’t believe they even want to be understood as much as they want to be endured or survived. They construct towering monoliths of feedback and collapse, that will require you to clock in and wear your hard hat if you want to get to the other side without getting injured.

Their new EP Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On is one of the most abrasive, dissonant, physically domineering atrocities I’ve heard in years and I mean that as sincere praise.

Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On stretches four songs across more than thirty minutes of the most punishing sludge Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean have ever committed to tape. Where Obsession Destruction flirted with something almost resembling catchiness or at least structural coherence and Sisyphean Cruelty leaned into sheer tectonic weight, this EP feels like the band has decided that stability was optional.

This is easily the noisiest they’ve ever sounded on record. Not just louder. Not just heavier. Noisier in a way that feels structurally unsound. The riffs lurch instead of march. The feedback doesn’t decorate the songs; it corrodes them from the inside. There’s a wobbly, unsafe quality to these compositions, like the whole thing might collapse mid-measure and take you with it. It’s terrifying in a way that feels less theatrical and more… unhinged? As if they’ve accessed a register of hostility they didn’t previously allow themselves to explore.

The opener An Abundance of Mercy is the most abstract piece on the record, which is an audacious way for Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean to introduce this latest chapter. It begins with groaning, destabilized guitars and a drum performance that wouldn’t have felt out of place on one of Miles Davis’ late, electric-era fever dreams, less about rhythm than about tension.

Then, almost perversely, it locks into a mid-tempo rager, the closest thing this EP has to something akin to Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean’s classic sound. But that stability doesn’t last. The song eventually collapses into an atmospheric crawl where the guitar recedes and the drums become spare, patient and ominously authoritative. Structurally, it’s strange. Emotionally, it’s feral. An Abundance of Mercy feels wounded and hostile. It thrashes and lurches like a dying animal.

Upheaval is the shortest track on Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On, barely scraping four minutes, and somehow it feels like one the most unbrindled blasts of fury Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean have ever recorded. If the opener staggered like something wounded, Upheaval comes out swinging with intent.

Sonically, this is the EP at its most hostile. The standout moment is another drum breakdown — and at this point it’s becoming clear that the percussion is the emotional spine of this record — adorned with visceral, serrated screeches that weaponize the building tension. Everything ratchets tighter and tighter until the song detonates in a scorched-earth finale, the anonymous vocalist spitting the line the knife hidden in hand, the knife hidden in heart like a mantra or maybe a confession.

It’s not conventionally enjoyable. There’s no groove to sink into, no melody to cling to. But that’s almost the point. Upheaval functions as a pressure valve. It delivers catharsis not through beauty, but through overwhelming force. The release comes from the sheer physicality of it, the sense that something internal has finally been expelled at maximum volume.

It’s almost impossible to parse a clear narrative from the lyrics on Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On, but the emotional thesis feels unmistakable. This isn’t anger directed at a single betrayal or political grievance. It feels older than that. Deeper. Like an exhaustion with a form of cruelty so ancient, so etched into the architecture of existence, that resisting it starts to feel naïve.

This is apocalyptic pain without a specific apocalypse. A hateful kind of despair — not the sadness of loss, but the bitterness of realizing the system was never designed for mercy in the first place.

An Adornment Of Light is the most recognizable Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean track here. It stretches past seven minutes in a slow, doomy procession that nods unmistakably toward Thou, whose influence is obvious (hence the band name!). But even in its relative conventionality, there’s something corrosive at work. By the end, a leering, almost accusatory guitar melody claws its way out of the surrounding chaos, not as salvation, but as a moment of unnerving clarity.

It reminded me of House of Ideas by the New Orleans legends from their 2024 record Umbilical, where beauty doesn’t interrupt the devastation so much as expose it.

The closer Execution is the most explosive and perversely exhilarating moment on Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On. After thirty minutes of corrosion, Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean erupt instead of fading out. The vocal performance is anthemic and vindictive at once, as if the singer has decided that if mercy isn’t coming, neither is restraint. Beneath it all, the song overflows with noxious melancholy and sheets of overbearing feedback that feel toxic and inescapable.

The drums return to that jazzy, intuitive instability that opened the record, refusing to sit obediently in the pocket. They surge and pivot instead of locking in. The whole thing feels alive in a way that has nothing to do with entertainment. It doesn’t want to please you. It behaves like a natural disaster — indifferent, unstoppable, washing over everything you thought was stable and leaving only wreckage in its wake.

There’s no Hole in My Head. No Summer Comes to Multiply. Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On has no interest in providing an entry point. There are no hooks waiting to be discovered later, no accidental hits hiding beneath the distortion. What you’ll find instead are hostile soundscapes built for mean-mugging the void.

It makes a strange kind of sense. Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean have always seemed to drift toward entropy with each release, sanding away accessibility in favor of abrasion. This is their least welcoming record to date and also their most fully realized. The chaos feels deliberate. The violence feels earned.

This is music that will either register immediately or not at all. There’s no middle ground, no gradual acclimation period. You don’t learn to like this EP. You recognize yourself in it or you don’t.