A year ago, Neurosis—one of the most influential bands in the second half of heavy metal’s lifespan, as extreme as they were accessible and enterprising—appeared dead. Jason Roeder, their drummer of four decades, began making cryptic posts about leaving the road, offloading records, and dismantling his rig. Roeder soon clarified he had been summarily dismissed from Sleep, but he didn’t seem so sure about the flagship’s status, either. The members would move on in some uncertain form, he surmised, “with or without me.”
Nearly a decade had passed since Neurosis’ most recent record and its first that felt perfunctory, but neither time nor energy was the real issue. In 2019, Neurosis had silently split with cofounder Scott Kelly, keeping his domestic abuse and emotional manipulation and subsequent dismissal quiet to respect his family’s wish for privacy. When Kelly finally copped to the damage, the rest of Neurosis offered no quarter. “Usually, we would view public openness and honesty about mental illness as brave and even productive,” the band wrote. “We just don’t believe that is the case here.” Their presumed senescence after that rupture felt like the plot for some bittersweet Neurosis epic: Cut out the cancer, then die slowly, anyway.
No score yet, be the first to add.
But even as Roeder puzzled publicly over the future, Neurosis’ second life was slowly beginning with him. In April 2024, Aaron Turner—the prolific Isis, Sumac, and Old Man Gloom mastermind and one of Neurosis’ most distinguished descendants—rehearsed with the remaining quartet for the first time. He and Steve Von Till, the other half of Neurosis’ erstwhile two-headed tandem, had been writing and playing together as a private duo. They were, it seemed, indulging a hesher joke from a quarter-century earlier, when skeptics scoffed at the “Cult of Neurisis” as pretentious metal with an outsized superiority complex.
Less than two years since that first full-band rendezvous, a five-piece Neurosis fronted by its new tandem have surprise-released An Undying Love for a Burning World on the Spring Equinox, a day so traditionally auspicious for renewal it long ago prompted the Swiss to set snowmen effigies on fire. Undying Love is Neurosis’ best album in two decades and maybe even a quarter-century, a bright-eyed and hopeful rebirth from a band that’s not naïve enough to pretend life won’t eventually end in the dark. These eight songs demand we get on with the living, anyway.
In Neurosis’ first interview about Undying Love, Von Till told Apple Music that the album’s introduction—a minute-long fusillade of warped screams about how we’ve become disconnected from each other and our own mortality—isn’t political. This is the stuff, he insists, about which Neurosis have always written. He is right, but, in a moment where basic decency has become a wedge issue, he is also wrong.
Undying Love reads like an unintentional and elliptical manifesto, where the essential values are simply about dignity: solidarity over exploitation, mutual support for our neighbors, an understanding that the narcissism of small differences only truncates a life that is already too short. The language here is doomscroll-stark: dead rivers, bleeding fingers, bruised bodies, broken land, frozen corpses. But as Von Till screams toward the end of “Untethered,” a psychedelic blues-metal triumph that condenses past and present and future into four riveting minutes, it’s always worth looking up or ahead, even if the horizon gets crowded: “Seeking an honest share of clear sky … Far as the eye can see, rats on the wire.”
