Album Review: Neurosis, An Undying Love for a Burning World
Probably safe to assume that nobody even remotely aware of how it went down felt good about the way Neurosis ended, with 30-plus years of brutally shamanic musical healing undone in an afternoon by founding guitarist/vocalist Scott Kelly confessing that he’d been abusing his family for years. That was April 2022, and at the time, the band said Kelly had already been out of the lineup for three years and that they didn’t mention it out of respect to his family’s request.
They never said, “we’re done as a band,” but for four years, Neurosis basically went dark. Guitarist/vocalist Steve Von Till continued solo work, their label Neurot Recordings stayed open with new releases, but keyboardist/sampler Noah Landis, drummer Jason Roeder (now ex-Sleep, much to that band’s inevitable loss whenever they come back) and bassist/backing vocalist Dave Edwardson — the latter two also founding members of Neurosis — hadn’t been heard from in years, until An Undying Love for a Burning World.
Aaron Turner, formerly of post-metal innovators Isis, presently of Sumac and sundry other projects and collaborations, is arguably the best person on the planet for the guitarist/vocalist job, and through the eight songs and 63 minutes of An Undying Love for a Burning World, he adds to the songs not in the manner of doing a Scott Kelly impression, but in a way true to his own work, whether it’s the way his voice pairs with Von Till‘s in the quiet middle of closer “Last Light,” the low growl (more Edwardson than anyone, if we’re going by in-Neurosis comparisons) punctuating the lurch in post-intro leadoff “Mirror Deep,” both new and reminiscent of something the band might’ve done on 1992’s Souls at Zero (reissue review here), or any number of instrumental nuances that could be read as his contribution.
The album sounds like he took part in the writing, and one would expect a veteran band like Neurosis to know that, if they were going to do this, the creative aspect needed to be there from everybody. It gives An Undying Love for a Burning World a forward-looking cast, and while Turner wouldn’t have been the only candidate for that job — YOB‘s Mike Schiedt, The Keening/SubRosa‘s Rebecca Vernon, and Jackie Perez-Gratz (Grayceon), the latter of whom has done a fair amount of recording with the band over the years, come to mind as others — his inclusion pushes Neurosis forward in ways they very much needed to move forward if they were going to release music again.
It was a surprise drop and the internet broke. “The hive lost its fucking mind,” as the swaying, four-minute cut “Untethered” might say. We all became that one mean tweet, or at least those who already weren’t. Having not been cool enough to be in on the secret for the last year or however long they were making the record — you probably were, and cheers to that — I was blindsided by it, and so I remain. The last Neurosis album was issued a 10 years ago, 2016’s Fires Within Fires (review here), and as big a change as bringing Turner is to the sound and dynamic of the band — more low growls, stark turns, and it’s 2026 and even Neurosis gotta harmonize — the 2024 passing of producer Steve Albini, who helmed six consecutive Neurosis full-lengths, from 1999’s Times of Grace through Fires Within Fires and just the fact that anyone else is sitting in that chair at the board, also lends An Undying Love for a Burning World a different feel, and one less directly stage-minded. That is not to take away from Scott Evans‘ work filling those shoes here. It’s just one more thing to be surprised by along the way.
“Untethered” lands as the jumping off point into the extended closing duo of “In the Waiting Hours” (10:16) and the multiple-movement “Last Light” (16:58), which feel complementary and continuing a thread through an imagined progression of time from the earlier “First Red Rays.” If that’s a theme, it’s largely unstated. The 53-second intro “We Are Torn Wide Open” is comprised of intertwining layers of voice, delay effects and such, and its lyrics are a treatise:
We Are Torn Wide Open
The separation that burns our hearts
Is the root of all our disease
We’ve forgotten how to live, so we suffer
We’ve forgotten how to struggle, so we suffer
We’ve forgotten how to die, so we suffer
We’ve forgotten we are wild, so we suffer
We exist in isolation, so we sufferThe dissonance is deafening
Does anyone, I wonder, feel right now like they’ve forgotten how to struggle? Everything costs four times as much as it did last time Neurosis put out an album. Civil liberties are trampled on daily if not hourly, human beings are being locked in warehouses, the US is at fucking war — again — and there is no sign of anything on any level getting better in my lifetime. But ‘we’ haven’t forgotten how to live, we’re just too busy at work. Or, you know, dying. This kind of self-agreeing dude-philosophy positing that if we all went out in the woods in camo and shot a deer we’d rediscover our humanity speaks from a position of privilege and discounts the actual oppression of the day, whether that’s in Gaza, or Kansas, or your own mind.
It makes great, podcast-ready oneliners, but do human beings shitting in the corners of the warehouses where they’re being indefinitely detained without legal due process feel like they’ve forgotten how to struggle? To die? Maybe it isn’t that ‘we’ have forgotten how to struggle, live wild, and perish somehow fulfilled, but that we’re blind to these things because everything is struggle. Unable to see the forest for the trees, if you’d like a woodsy cliché. The problem is capitalism. These things aren’t forgotten. They’ve been stolen. From you, ‘we,’ and everyone. If you feel isolated, that’s on purpose. The world burning is on purpose.
What ensues as “Mirror Deep” and “First Red Rays” pick up from that lead-in is both signature Neurosis and something new brought to that established pattern — which, by the way, is also part of the pattern itself; it’s not like Neurosis were putting out the same record every other year between 1986 and 2016; change has always been the order — and signature lurch. Both songs are intense on balance, both lead the listener deeper into the procession and flow, and the crush is cathartic as a sheer onslaught and coupled by intricate ambience between Turner‘s added synth to Landis‘, Von Till‘s various now-the-guitar-sounds-like-it’s-made-of-molten-metal effects and I won’t claim to know what else. The subsequent “Blind” feels more open, speaking more to releases like 2012’s Honor Found in Decay or 2004’s The Eye of Every Storm (discussed here), and finds Von Till and Turner singing together as a preface for “Last Light” to come.
“Seething and Scattered” (I think) brings Edwardson into a triad call-and-response across channels that adds to the urgency of the recaptured churn, and the keyboardy feel of the break distinguishes it, as well as the hard-toms as Roeder builds the tension back up to the noisy, all-in finish, slamming down and pausing only briefly before “Untethered” picks up the momentum. The aforementioned four-minute track is the shortest, aside from “We Are Torn Wide Open,” and like “Mirror Deep” could make a fitting introduction for listeners to discover how the shifts in Neurosis lineup have played out in their sound. It’s also the most satisfying rumble of bass on An Undying Love for a Burning World, and if you told me that was how it wound up on the record, I would absolutely believe you.
Across the span, the songs work together to create the broader reality of the whole album, and from “Mirror Deep” onward, the immersion is a plunge for those willing to take it. Perhaps nowhere more so than on “In the Waiting Hours” and “Last Light,” which despite having their own intentions stand together in my mind so that’s how I’m putting them. They’re a few minutes short of half the total runtime, but are significant portion of it just the same, and with “Untethered” on side C they make up the entirety of the 2LP edition’s second platter, the closer standing alone as it invariably would.
A speedy electronic pulse permeates “Last Light” at the beginning and returns at the end, but that does little to tell you the scope of the song itself. Turner growls, and howls, over the first couple minutes before at 2:27 the crush begins anew, and the nod grows more weighted until a long midsection break seems to be running multiple experiments at the same time. Fair enough as a setup for the last thrust, but Neurosis by then have done big finishes multiple times over, and while “Last Light” sees its tonal crux return, they eschew ‘grand finale’-type posturing or onslaught just for its own sake. It’s always been about something deeper, and so it still seems to be.
Like many who will take it on, I was surprised to have a new Neurosis album show up, and while I still have questions — for example, Scott Kelly was a founding member of this band and invariably had or has a stake in the LLC that almost surely legally binds them; does he get a cut from this or the back catalog at this point? — and I still feel like I’m getting to know the songs on An Undying Love for a Burning World, I recognize that feeling as being part and parcel to the experience of listening to Neurosis. They’ve never put out disposable records, or something to hear while the hype was hot and then put away and forget. In the best case, you live with their music, and it changes you and how you hear it changes over time. After four years of not having that and a decade on from their last release, four decades on from their outset, their return makes it clear how much it’s been missed.
Neurosis, An Undying Love for a Burning World (2026)
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Great review JJ. I’ve heard it for the first time three days ago and it filled my heart with pure, ravageous joy.
Wasn’t sure I needed this until I heard it. It’s amazing. Thank you
This was a surprise to me, too, and I’m also surprised by how fast and effectively it hit for me. The second half is fantastic. Looking forward to this ending up as everyone’s #1 for the year unless some other random surprise album happens between now and then.
I’m still trying to avoid shitty places on the internet, but this made me wonder what happened between the vaguebooking last year and this coming together. Like did Roeder get visited by a fairy sludgemother after that? “If you promise not to sell all your shit, we’ll reform Neurosis. Cool?” Sprinkle sprinkle pumpkin carriage.