Cold Gawd: I’ll Drown on This Earth Album Review

Cold Gawd have often dreamed of escape. The Southern California band’s singer and primary songwriter, Matthew Wainwright, has said that his lyrics on their 2022 album God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here came from a place of intense existential discomfort—that after a lifetime of ignoring his issues with himself and the world around him, he felt trapped in “bad habits and old ways of thinking.” Desperation haunts the record’s dense thickets of nervy distortion and anguished whispers; it’s right there in the title’s prayer for deliverance. They wanted out at any cost.

I’ll Drown on This Earth, the band’s second full-length, opens with a scream that suggests the intervening years haven’t been much easier. Pained and phlegmatic, the opening moments of “Gorgeous” give way to a static-scoured ballad of what-ifs and could’ve-beens, with Wainwright murmuring about being born again into a better life that feels just out of reach. It only becomes more intense over the five and a half minutes that ensue, roiling and swelling into a crushing climax that recalls the stormy post-metal catharsis of bands like Envy and Deafheaven.

Sickly, overwhelming, and downcast, this is familiar territory for Cold Gawd, but it’s also one of only a few songs that hew so closely to the sludge-splashed shoegaze they’ve become known for over the past few years. They’ve often expressed feeling hemmed in by the genre—as one of their T-shirts memorably puts it: “Shoegaze is a prison.” And while I’ll Drown on This Earth does use tracks like “Gorgeous” to demonstrate their intimate knowledge of the sound’s grand scale and gloomy sonics, they’re also clearly eager to push beyond it. Wainwright has said he intended this record to be more than just “another ‘woe is me’ sort of thing.” Instead, he wrote of tenderness and intimacy, the dawning of new desire, and the mutual dependence that blooms out of lasting love.

Though the scuzzy murk of Cold Gawd’s older songs is still present, it’s illuminated by a newfound serenity in the smeary synth pads of ““Nudism”” and other similarly contemplative songs. As Wainwright sings of a figure that visits him only in dreams, the track burbles and laps in a way that feels pensive and surreal, a rare quiet moment for a troubled mind. “Tappan” is similarly reflective; the sleepwalking, loop-laden ballad recalls the tape-melted haze of Toro y Moi’s earliest experiments more than it does any of the punkish brutalism that informed their foundational work. Guitars stutter nervously underneath washes of spectral ambiance, distinct parts blurring together in foggy bokeh. Amid the fog, Wainwright whispers a vision of love: “I saw heaven in instances of you.”