Matt Pike has been playing faster, heavier, louder than almost everyone else in metal for thirty years, first with Sleep, then with High on Fire, occasionally with both at the same time, and Cometh the Storm is the record that makes that history feel earned rather than simply remarkable. Six years since Electric Messiah, and in that time Pike lost part of a foot to diabetes, got sober, and apparently came back angrier than ever. You can hear all of it.
“Lambsbread” opens the album with a riff that sounds like it arrived fully formed rather than composed, the kind of guitar line that seems inevitable in retrospect, heavy and fast in equal measure. “Burning Down” is the album’s most immediate track, a thrash-inflected assault that puts Pike’s guitar tone front and center: thick, saturated, precise despite the distortion. “Trismegistus”, named for Hermes Trismegistus, the mythological figure who bridges alchemy, astrology, and theurgy, is the album’s most ambitious moment: sprawling, riff-heavy, the kind of track that justifies High on Fire’s place at the top of the genre.
The instrumental “Karanlık Yol” (Turkish for “Dark Road”) is the album’s unexpected breath of air, melancholic, atmospheric, and proof that Pike can write a guitar piece that doesn’t rely on volume for its emotional weight. “Sol’s Golden Curse” closes with the record’s most epic stretch, the final minutes expanding into something genuinely cinematic. Jeff Matz and Corey Hagg hold everything down with the efficiency of a rhythm section that has been playing these tempos for long enough to make them look inevitable.
Produced by Kurt Ballou (Converge, Nails, Kvelertak), who knows exactly how to make guitars sound both enormous and precise. The mix sits at the louder end of the modern metal spectrum without sacrificing the note definition that Pike’s riff-writing requires. Drums are right up front, not buried in the guitars, which is the right call for a band whose rhythmic intensity is as central as the riff work. Fast when it’s fast, crushing when it’s crushing, with enough dynamic contrast to keep the intensity readable rather than fatiguing.
Standout tracks: Lambsbread, Trismegistus, Sol’s Golden Curse
There’s a version of this album that would have been a safe, comfortable return from a reliable band. Cometh the Storm is not that version. It’s Pike at his most committed, playing like he has something to prove, which it turns out he does.
