Bandcamp State dependent memory is a real phenomenon: information encoded in one mental state becomes inaccessible in another. You remember the thing only when you return to the conditions under which you learned it. Unmother’s second album uses this as both title and structure, circling back to the same emotional coordinates from different angles across six tracks and 38 minutes. The London four-piece describe the record as an effort “to capture the feeling of being lost inside a vast, busy, and suffocating urban landscape,” and the music delivers on that premise with an intensity that feels earned rather than performed.
“My Armor” opens fast and bright, the guitars cutting through the upper mid-range with a raw distortion that leaves no room for comfort. V.’s vocals shift between blackened screams and a spoken register that carries the weight of the lyrics: “Behind wooden doors / A sense of safety / Behind a wooden shield / A failed armor.” The imagery is domestic and claustrophobic, protection that does not protect, language that does not communicate. By the time the track reaches “My armor is whole / I open the door / And breathe the air of oblivion,” the armour has become the problem rather than the solution.
“Bear Hug” is the album’s most visceral track. The lyrics describe inherited violence with a directness that post-black metal rarely attempts: “Loving you / Means swallowing swords / A twist of the blade too many / For me to bleed internally.” The embrace of the title is a chokehold. “Like those men before us” repeats through the second half, generational damage passed down through affection that doubles as control. Azoso and Declwa’s guitars maintain a wall of distortion underneath while the vocal dynamics carry the emotional range.
“Modern Dystopia” shifts perspective from the personal to the architectural. The city itself speaks: “Upon my symphony of bodies, gaze / Let the spires of my Majesty, Metropolis / Scream crimson with your blood.” Venla’s additional vocals on this track and the title track add a second dimension, her voice threading through V.’s screams like a parallel consciousness. The track ends with the quietest moment on the record: “No god will weep for me / But I will tell myself / That I did what I had to / Maybe / The screams will stop.”
“Attiki-Victoria” is an ODOS 55 cover, a Greek-language track that grounds the album in a specific cultural lineage. It is the shortest piece at four and a half minutes, and its function is less musical than geographical, a reminder that London’s isolation is experienced through the lens of displacement.
The title track closes the core of the album at nearly nine minutes. “You keep coming back / To where it started / Searching for reason, searching for meaning / For the origins of rage.” The state dependent memory of the title is the curse: you can only access the wound by returning to the place that made it. “Crossroad after crossroad after crossroad / On a cross.” The wordplay is blunt and it lands.
The mix is bright and aggressive, with the drums sitting front and centre in a way that dominates the frequency spectrum. The guitars and bass, despite the layered work from Azoso and Declwa, recede behind the percussion, creating a mix where the rhythmic framework overshadows the harmonic content. The tempo is fast and relentless, which compounds the drum-forward balance. The vocals maintain clarity, which is critical for an album this dependent on its lyrics, but the instrumental interplay that the songwriting sets up does not always come through in the production. Angeliki Mourgela’s mix serves the aggression well but leaves the textural details in the background where they deserve more space.
Standout tracks: “Bear Hug” for the most unflinching writing on the record, where inherited violence is rendered without metaphor. “Modern Dystopia” for the shift in perspective that makes the city a character. “State Dependent Memory” for the nine-minute closer that ties the album’s threads into a knot it refuses to untie.
The writing is strong enough to carry a record whose mix does not always serve it. State Dependent Memory is an album with a sharp conceptual vision and lyrics that reward close reading, housed in a production that favours impact over nuance. The drum-forward balance means the quieter textural work, the details that would give the songs more dimension, gets lost in the volume. The ideas deserve a wider frame than the mix provides. What comes through is still worth hearing. What gets buried is the difference between a good album and a great one.
