The album opens with a hymn and closes with the same one. That old American folk song, this world is not my home, I’m just passing through, isn’t placed ironically. It’s placed exactly right. Unself, Conjurer’s third full-length and their first for Nuclear Blast, is an album about not belonging: to institutions, to society, to a self that was never quite the shape the world demanded.
The Rugby four-piece have always occupied the space where sludge metal’s low-end brutality meets post-metal’s patience, its willingness to let songs breathe before they collapse. Unself doesn’t abandon that, but it sharpens it. This is the most focused record Conjurer have made, and the most politically direct. The anger here isn’t decorative.
The title track is a brief introduction, three minutes of gathering guitar noise laid beneath that looped folk refrain. Then “All Apart” opens the album proper and the shift is immediate: guitars thick and low, the riff deliberate, the lyrics confronting the mechanics of identity formation under institutional pressure. Hurried into a sense of Self. Rules unwritten, norms unspoken. The song builds slowly, the arrangement swelling and pulling back before arriving at a clean final passage that feels earned rather than released too early.
“There Is No Warmth” is the record’s emotional centre. The lyrics are written from deep inside an experience most people only encounter from the outside, isolation, sensory overwhelm, the exhaustion of existing in a world that doesn’t make space for you, the quiet pull toward an early end. Vocalist Brady Deeprose delivers them without melodrama, which is exactly the right instinct. The music grinds rather than soars, the guitars sitting in the midrange where they press rather than lift. It’s one of the best things Conjurer have written.
“The Searing Glow” turns outward, a song about consumerism and its machinery, the neon promise that keeps people working and spending while the gap between the life sold and the life available only widens. The riff is the album’s most propulsive, five minutes that move with a purpose the earlier tracks deliberately withhold. The brief instrumental “A Plea” follows as a palate cleanser, a moment of quiet before the record’s second half.
“Let Us Live” is blunt and necessary, a song about queer and marginalized people demanding the right to exist, built to a declaration rather than a question. “Hang Them In Your Head” and “Foreclosure” extend the political reach, the latter handling healthcare denial and medical debt with a cold, procedural fury that suits the subject. At seven and a half minutes it’s the album’s longest track, and its most relentless, delay, displace, deny repeated like a mantra, each repetition heavier than the last.
Then the hymn returns. “This World Is Not My Home” closes things not with resolution but recurrence, the same words, now weighted by everything that came before. The world still hasn’t changed. The longing remains.
Unself is not a comfortable record and doesn’t try to be. But it’s a coherent one, built around a set of ideas that the band pursue with conviction across nine tracks, and a heavy one in all the ways that count.
Standout tracks: There Is No Warmth, All Apart, Foreclosure
