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.
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.”
The new Neurosis push forward in much the same way as the old one, at least at their best, did: They make seamless fusions of unlikely elements, an avaricious plunder of genres used as pavers on the path between woe and redemption. “In the Waiting Hours” moves from a gorgeous if downcast drift to a sludge metal storm, “Seething and Scattered” from a feverish trance shaped by Noah Landis’ synths and sequencers to a feedback-and-drums climax that would make most math-rock bands blush. Undying Love is ever-unfolding, some new intricacy always on the verge of appearing.
The showcase for this craft is the 17-minute finale, “Last Light.” Turner begins by bellowing over industrial bass quakes before the guitars and drums kick in, with Roeder’s sense of patience and scale seemingly galvanized by his time playing stoner metal epics. There’s an absolutely heroic riff, a malevolent noise breakdown, a spectral little choir around which circuits buzz like flies, and a slowly rising instrumental expanse that reminds you that marching bands began for war, not sports. This is a saga about mortality, about how even as we go about our workaday lives we exist beneath the shadow of “death … a ravenous beast.” But in the last five minutes, the band seems to revel in that inevitability, not wallow in it. Neurosis are invigorated by what the ultimate end means for right now. The obliterative coda, all din and drums, sounds triumphant, with Neurosis simply motivated by the act and force of howling once again.
It’s worth returning to that silly old portmanteau that has now come to pass, Neurisis. Back when that joke was current, Neurosis and Isis were dual powerhouses: the former a veteran act that had just reached a magnetic new apogee, the latter upstarts whose brief but brilliant run was also nearing its peak. Full-band collaborations were, for better and worse, a big thing at that moment, with Isis even making a record alongside Aerogramme. I’m glad they avoided it; I fear they would have canceled one another out, becoming overlapping waves like some of their peers.
But this delayed and unexpected intersection is entirely additive. Turner arrives in time not just to help restart this American metal institution but, really, to resurrect it. And the rest of Neurosis fully integrates him, not only indulging his propensities for textural chaos and stentorian vocals but also letting him design the artwork; he is not a substitute but, instead, a new engine. “True wealth between our fingers slip,” Turner roars toward the middle of “Mirror Deep,” a song that is as beautiful and heavy as any life well lived. “As we count the dead.” Neurosis is not yet among the ranks of those lost, a truly affirming joy for a burning world.
