Quarterly Review: Spirit Adrift, The Mon, Hällas, Okay You Win, Bong Voyage, King Potenaz, Cowboys & Aliens, Endless Floods, Duncan Park, Luxury Weapons
Posted in Reviews on May 19th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
Day two, feeling good after coming in hot yesterday after the weekend of writing. Have I ever told you about my fantasy QR? No? I write reviews of stuff all along, every day, then when it’s QR time I just roll it all out and take an actual week off. Wouldn’t it enhance your enjoyment knowing that somewhere, sometime, I’m sitting on ass and not frantically trying to finish the next day’s reviews?
I haven’t ever been able to manifest that reality, so here I am, yesterday, maybe two days before, trying to put it together. Same as every other QR I’ve done in the past 12 or 13 years, however long I’ve been doing these. Long enough to know when one feels good. Yesterday was cool. I have high hopes accordingly for today’s batch. I try to do myself favors in putting these together as best I can.
Quarterly Review #11-20:
Spirit Adrift, Infinite Illumination
Led for the last decade by Nate Garrett initially as a solo-project and then as a full, touring and working band, Spirit Adrift come to a reported close with Infinite Illumination, the Austin outfit’s sixth album. Melancholia and metal intertwine on songs like “Window Within,” the chuggy ’90s groover “Born in a Bad Way,” and “White Death,” which resolves with a massive nod. The band have always tipped the balance of metal and doom, so these are fitting sounds on which to go out, if in fact Garrett (also Neon Nightmare) is done with it. “Where Once There Was an Ocean” unfolds slowly at the end of the album, and stately in its intro and very much in that place between, what with the shredding solo and chugging center riff progression, but it’s all part of the identity the band carved during their time, keeping ’90s Hellhound Records-style doom alive and carried forward for the next generation. Excited for what Garrett does next, but Spirit Adrift earned this farewell in the interim.
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The Mon, Songs of Embrace
‘Embrace’ doesn’t necessarily mean accessibility as Ufomammut‘s Urlo puts the finishing stamp on the two-LP ‘Embrace the Abandon’ cycle with his solo-project The Mon‘s Songs of Embrace. What he calls ’embrace,’ I would generally consider immersion. Drone is a big part of it through this 10-track answer to 2025’s Songs of Abandon (review here), textures of synth and guitar, some jangling keys before the static push in “Ritual of Night Violence.” There’s beauty to be had, whether it’s in the more direct guitar of “Incantation” or “Embers of Calendula,” but neither is “Ritual of Night Violence” the only foray into abrasion, with the penultimate “Echoes of the Drowned” and opener “Invocation of the Abyss” also harnessing these textures. “Embrace the Abandon,” a title-track for two records, closes with shimmery synth, noise, a machine that goes ‘bing!’ and other echoing noises. Texture, in other words. You knew it was going to be out there. Hoping Urlo keeps developing this project as an outlet for such weirdness.
Supernatural Cat Records website
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Hällas, Panorama
The fourth album from Sweden’s dramatic progressive kraut rockers Hällas — also their first self-release through Äventyr Records — Panorama opens with its longest track (immediate points) in the 21-minute, side-A-consuming “Above the Continuum,” and as a single track, it indeed goes down like the half an album it is. Packed with twists, vocal and tonal changes, shifts in arrangement, that spoken piece in the second half and each new part seeming like a different stage in the dynamic procession leading toward a somehow-not-overblown finish, it’s a triumph of their craft, to say the least of it. Side B brings four cuts starting with “Face of an Angel,” which might be yacht prog but for the Nazgûl wails, while “The Emissary” is more sweeping in its scope and works into a headspinning tizzy before it’s done, giving over to the penultimate “Bestiaus,” which in itself is voice and keyboard but also has a waveform static intro to closer “At the Summit,” begun with classical guitar as they make ready to blow-out a six-minute finish that feels duly epic in its reach. This is a band who’ve made their own place by fitting nowhere else. Panorama feels earned.
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Okay You Win, End of Days
London heavy rockers Okay You Win give a couple different looks on their debut album, End of Days, on Blues Funeral. Underlying it all across the eight-song/52-minute offering is a sense of songwriting and intention in how each track unfolds, but to that, there is a longform modus and what feels like a complementary immediacy to offset some of the digging in of songs like “Beat Me Down” or “The Greatest Lie.” End of Days somewhat turns expectation on its head by putting the more expansive material up front, and cuts like “This Damned Place,” closer “Own It” and the abovementioned — all of which top seven minutes in length — present a scope informed by desert heavy and dual-guitar metal, feeling a bit like a complement to labelmates Solace in that regard. The shorter (sub-five minutes) title-track and “Red Flag” land with a more direct take, and what comes across most of all is a nascent malleability between the two sides that feels like it will eventually be bridged in their sound. Taken as a whole, the album is elemental, which is to say, this is a strong and ambitious initial showing, and how they grow from here will be the ultimate story of the band.
Blues Funeral Recordings website
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Bong Voyage, Hedonistic Hard Rock
You would not call Bong Voyage subtle in opening cut “Saturday Rite Special” (get it?) as they quickly toss out “Hail Satan and Iron Maiden!” among the fervent declarations of self and purpose. That’s not the last time they’ll make that rhyme. The Oslo heavy party rockers, true to form, have plenty of metal in their foundations and the namedrops to prove it, but are here for a good time, and even a comparative letup like “UFOria” or the ’80s-tastic take on Billy Idol in “Enabler” ahead of the big-roller “Wizard of Ozlo” stand testament to the point, never mind the shouty shenanigans of “Large and In Charge,” “Outer Space Freebase” or “In Possession” at the finish. If you’re at the show, they’ve already spilled (poured?) beer on you, but that’s to be expected for material of such physicality, songs written with movement and audience engagement central to their ideology. They’re not reinventing the wheel, but they’re bending the frames to make it roll like it’s drunk and never hungover.
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King Potenaz, Arcane Desert Rituals Vol. 2
Unflinching in their exploration of the darker side of heavy rock and roll and dungeon-style metal, Fasano, Italy’s King Potenaz follow 2025’s Arcane Desert Rituals Vol. 1 (review here) as the core trio of guitarist/vocalist Giuseppe Guarini, bassist Francesco Pensato and drummer Piero Schiavone mirror that album’s structure in a likewise adventurous complement. Whether it’s the grim desert expanse of “Sumerian Nights” or the lumbering psychedoomic jam “A Crack in the Void (The Empty Hand Pt. 2),” King Potenaz remain unto themselves in intention, fostering a fuzzy but still post-punk shove in “Lord of the Rust” — think stonergoth — while “The Nothingness” feels as much like a ritual as a song, the band putting the listener into the proceedings as much as itself. Not redundant of the prior album, but pushing farther from it, Arcane Desert Rituals Vol. 2 reaffirms the individual nature of what King Potenaz do. They aren’t quite like anything else out there, and more, they seem to know it.
Majestic Mountain Records webstore
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Cowboys & Aliens, Finis Temporum
Celebrating their 30th anniversary in 2026, Cowboys & Aliens unveil Finis Temporum, a front-to-back six-song/32-minute banger that’s as righteous an argument in favor of classic-style, turn-of-the-century European heavy rock as one could ask from a band who was there and part of making it. Closer “Asteroid Blast” reminds of that, remade as it was from 2000’s A Trip to the Stonehenge Colony, but I’ll be damned if the opening salvo of “Life Tree” and “Rabbit Hole” doesn’t kick ass out of the gate, backed by the reachout in “Vengeance of the Weird” and the big hook in “Ordinary Bliss” ahead of the fuzzstrutter “Icy Grip.” I suppose that’s to say momentum gets on their side early and the shove that ensues is rad. Melodies soar over tonally and rhythmically vibrant riffing, and though they’re never far removed from the root verse/chorus trades of the material, the excitement level runs high across the span without sounding redundant at any point. If you’re not on board by the end of “Life Tree,” consult your primary care physician.
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Endless Floods, Passages
Endless Floods retain an experimentalist feel despite the outward solidity of their post-metallic take on Passages. With resonant vocals from Louise Dehaye (also sax), the largesse and sway of the full-band sound behind conjured by Stéphane Miollan (bass, guitar, vocals, synth) and Benjamin Sablon (drums, guitars, vocals, percussion) feels expansive and puporseful in a way that ‘experimental’ rarely captures. What’s happening across the four mostly-extended inclusions on the 37-minute outing, however, is a construction of form that is Endless Floods‘ own, able to slide or lumber or crunch through a piece like “Visions” or the lead single “Dieuxième Monde,” which are lush and gorgeous and still feel like a setup for the glory reached in the 10-minute linear build of “Liminal” and the synthy bleed toward closer “Primordial,” wherein the onslaught one might expect is subverted in favor of heavy post-rock ambience, contemplative melody and expansive soundscaping. If you never believed heavy metal could be beautiful, first of all, what are you doing here, and second, Passages serves as a convincing argument. It is engrossing.
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Duncan Park, Prana
Wooden clackychimes mark the beginning of Duncan Park‘s “Chöd” at the outset of the four-song Prana EP, soon complemented by resonant hand-drumming that gradually comes forward as the clacky-clacky recedes. This subdued moment is not misspent, but rather essential to the procession, shifting to standalone guitar on “BEBEBe” in the flavor of something Ben Chasny might elicit from the instrument in serene pastoralism, exploratory but grounded and accessible. Voice is an instrument in “Surfing the Bardo,” and that presence isn’t to be underestimated, but it’s still the guitar in focus, and the way the movement comes apart (before realigning) in the second half reminds of Beatles Esher demos and is correspondingly organic. Same could be said of the tape hiss behind the guitar of the title-track, which noodles around its central figure and sounds joyful in the doing, without getting lost even as it seems to rewind itself back for another listen. A quiet embrace from the Johannesburg-based Park, whose work remains evocative and escapist.
LINK
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Luxury Weapons, The Light in a Low Place
Richmind, Virginia’s Luxury Weapons is the trio of Trevor Thomas (Human Thurma, etc.), Bill Badgley (Federation X, etc.) and Erik Josephson (Hex Machine, etc.), and you can just take all that ‘etc.’ as meant to convey lifetimes’ worth of experience making music and playing in bands. The songwriting here is noise rock-sharp, but where the aggression to coincide with the chug might otherwise be is a rousing melodic sensibility, bolstered by the Kyle Spence (Harvey Milk) recording job and present in the spacious “Surrender” and the precision turns of “Been Gone” or “All We Knew.” This record came out over a year ago — yeah, it’s damn near June and I’m still sneaking in 2025 releases; wait until you hear about the decades of recorded music that existed before last month — so if you want to take this is me making a note to myself on something cool, I’m fine with that. There’s enough character in Luxury Weapons‘ sound to stand them out regardless of the last 13 months, and I certainly don’t hear anything on their debut that sounds like it’s about to expire now. If you haven’t heard it — and I know you have because you’re cooler than me — perhaps a word to the wise.
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