It’s their first album since 2016’s Fires Within Fires, and new vocalist/guitarist Aaron Turner (Sumac, ex-Isis) adds to a well-established lineup of the names like guitarist Steve Von Till and drummer Jason Roeder among others that had helped to bring you their previous 11 albums. It inevitably feels like a Neurosis record.
After a brief, essentially spoken word track, the band hits you with “Mirror Deep” which initially plods along before a quiet and eerie section acts as a bridge to something truly terrifying and effects ridden, dissonant riffs and a particular sound effect that I can’t quite place. This all results in an extremely chaotic and eventually, cohesive whole.
“First Red Rays” is a sludgy collective of a song with different layers of heaviness in the riffing but also moments of harmony and beauty that seem to be at the heart of the Neurosis mantra.
“Blind” begins with more scary sounding samples with Aaron Turner’s vocals evoking some of the band’s heavier vocal performances interspersed with vaguely bluesy riffs played at half speed and the distant subtlety of looped sounds and the synthesizer of Noah Landis.
“Seething and Scattered” begins with a staccato riff helping the band’s sound to scale the mountain with David Edwardson’s bass being a focal undercurrent to this movement’s power. “Untethered” comes into play building on odd riff structures with the two guitars often moving in two different directions but progressively comes together in a much more direct manner than could have been anticipated. “In The Waiting Hours” is layered with beauty from the very beginning before the oppressive nature of the music becomes known to the listener.
Closing things out is the nearly 17-minute “Last Light” which revisits some of the strongest part of the album until this point while adding in other eccentricities to round things out. A slight screechy sound joins in with the positive vibes on guitar to create a dichotomy that Neurosis is well-known for, pivoting on a dime to allow for the solace to sour and delve back into darkness, one that doesn’t need overt heaviness to convey its message.
Against all odds and without actually breaking up, Neurosis have managed to turn what was essentially seven years of silence into one of their best albums of the 21st century, certainly one of the heaviest efforts to date. Aaron Turner will help the band to usher in a new era of experimentation and heaviness, one that makes it feel as though this band never left our collective consciousness.
For an album that wasn’t supposed to happen but did anyway, An Undying Love For A Burning World is a special record, one that longtime fans will no doubt place highly within this legendary band’s discography.
(released March 20, 2026 on Neurot Recordings)
