Album Review: Rwake, The Return of Magik
Posted in Reviews on March 12th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
[NOTE: In this interest of full disclosure, I wrote the promotional bio for this album (posted here) and was compensated for it by Relapse Records. This did not factor into my decision to do this review — you can see in the links below it’s not my first time writing about the band — and I’m pretty sure the reason I was asked to do the bio in the first place was because I’m a fan, which, yes, I am. But I took a journalism class one time, so I feel a need to mention this kind of thing when it applies. Thanks for reading.]
One could not accuse Rwake of failing to see the beauty in horror. The Little Rock, Arkansas-based post-metallic conjurors are closing in on the 30th anniversary of the band next year, and perhaps the looming onset of another decade was a factor in their making The Return of Magik, their sixth album and first since 2011’s Rest (review here), but the passage of time is an important part of the procession, coinciding with the dynamic changes in space throughout.
That is to say, while “You Swore We’d Always Be Together” opens with a wistful stretch of acoustic guitar — drummer Jeff Morgan is credited with acoustics and 12-string bass, though John Judkins also plays guitar, lap and pedal steel and 12-string bass, and this record introduces Austin Sublett on lead guitar; Reid Raley plays bass, Brittany handles vocals and keys and Christopher “C.T.” Terry, also vocals, gives form to the preaches and cosmic declarations of “The Return of Magik,” “With Stardust Flowers,” and so on — the sense of breadth the band cast is met head-on by claustrophobically heavy riffing. Just because it’s been 14 years and one assumes a fair amount of life-living done in that time doesn’t mean Rwake are going to stop being Rwake.
The world they cast in The Return of Magik is their most vivid to-date — a place out in the woods on soft ground that you feel might just eat you on your next step because it might. The animal bones on the cover, especially cleaned and cared for as these have been, could hardly be more appropriate. It shows a reverence for the natural order and a reminder of the human place in it, and to coincide, they are more spiritual, ritualized in the delivery.
In his 2010 documentary, Slow Southern Steel (discussed here), Terry posits the advent of Southern heavy in part as a response to the cultural dominance of the southern baptist church, and Rwake have always been in conversation with that musical ideology, which one can hear in some of the guitar throughout the linear courses of “The Return of Magik” and “With Stardust Flowers” before Black Oak Arkansas‘ Jim “Dandy” Mangrum steps in for a spoken word guest spot in “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration,” the longest song at 13:56, reading a poem he wrote sort of as an existential assessment. It’s interesting how much of the spoken/semi-spoken vocals throughout feel like a sermon.
Mangrum‘s voice is manipulated with effects to give an otherworldly aspect, and that fits well alongside the rest of The Return of Magik, which from the mammoth lurch of “You Swore We’d Always Be Together” to the quiet space created at the finish by the sub-two-minute outro “Φ” (the Greek letter “Phi”), which follows the gnashing and consumptive churn and darkly progressive reality twist — plus a shimmering, scream-topped beautifully apocalyptic ending that’s more graceful than the black metal from which it might otherwise have derived — with some backmasking before it bursts into the crescendo.
Brittany, or sometimes just B., has a rasp of voice that is singular in underground heavy music, and like few harsh vocalists, she is able to both add to the atmosphere of the album’s five extended pieces while also providing some of its most vivid moments of extremity. “You Swore We’d Always Be Together” draws a lot of its impression from the lead guitar and acoustic thread, but especially in its first half, the title-track is monstrous in a genuinely nightmarish way, bleak and threatening and subliminal — of couse it ends gorgeous — and “With Stardust Flowers” plays back and forth off a similar level of crush.
This, in turn, flows like thick, seemingly bottomless, water into “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration,” with “In After Reverse” and “Φ” for culmination. A six-song/53-minute course is not inconsiderable in an age of fleeting attention spans and the instant/false gratification of technology’s numb-you-out-to-rob-you dopamine drip, but Rwake are a guiding presence through this ethereal mire they’ve swirled together — there’s talk of cauldrons I think in the title-track, and the image feels appropriate given both the dirt-mystique of those lyrics which are discernible in spoken parts and screams, etc. — and as much as aural threat persists, a sense of catharsis pours through even through the most outwardly caustic stretches.
Coupled with the willingness to veer into gorgeousness, whether that happens as the prog-metal twisting solo six minutes into “With Stardust Flowers” or the residual drone epilogue to “In After Reverse” or indeed many of the rawest and most intense stretches since that’s a kind of beauty too, Rwake circa 2025 present a mature take on some of what’s felt less controlled in their sound in the past, without letting go of the progressive songwriting ethic central to their richly individualized approach.
What that boils down to in terms of the listening experience is immersion with a pointed depth of mood and intermittent, well-used harshness among the tools employed, along with traditional Southern rock, psychedelic, prog metal, post-sludge, folk and an experimentalist foundation underpinning it all. Maybe even a little bit of New Age in there if you want to count some of the philosophy being thrown around in the lyrics.
One way or the other, The Return of Magik is a striking comeback for Rwake that, despite the 14 years it’s been since their last outing, will be recognizable to those who followed their course the better part of a generation ago while introducing new listeners to the fold, most of all by highlighting who Rwake are in its uncompromising, forward-thinking, distinctive craft. It’s a cohesive, engrossing, wholly realized work that’s an intangible meld of different players, ideas, styles, and times, so if you want to sum that up by calling it ‘magic’ — or ‘magik,’ as it were — then fair enough.
