[#MusicMonday 25.08.25] A Curious Trio of Upcoming Albums.
I’ll be a broken record and reiterate my usual sense of overwhelm with the staggering number of releases hitting our inbox of late! At a time in my personal life where things are feeling somewhat stalled/sluggish progress-wise, it’s been satisfying to spend a pretty healthy portion of my overall listening time investigating advance releases.
As per my usual MO, all of the below releases come to Inner-Strength Check recording-studio-farm to blog-table personally vetted by Yours Truly. I/we have little interest in turning the place into yet another endlessly grinding content mill. This week, I also decided to refine down the post criterion to artists showcasing some interesting and at times unexpected melding of genres.
There’s quite a bit of material in terms of links, music videos, streaming links etc. Again, broken record but do consider doing your own investigations of any artists that pique your interest here, as well as their relevant labels etc.
Peace, Love and Gumshoe Metal-Detection - Brady.
Crop [USA] - S.S.R.I (Released 22nd August via Third House Communications)
In the undercurrent of Lexington, KY’s heavy music scene, few bands hit as viscerally as CROP. Since forming in 2020, this four-piece—Marc Phillips (vocals), Zach Hunter (guitar), Braun Dabney (bass), and Andrew Beauvier (drums)—has crafted a sound that feels both dangerously raw and unflinchingly refined, grounded in the crushing gravity of 90s grunge but stretched into something darker, doomier, and entirely their own.
Their upcoming release, S.S.R.I, out August 22nd, 2025 via Third House Communications, is not just a sophomore album—it’s a psychological unearthing. Across 34 minutes and 46 seconds, CROP spirals through the internal wreckage of grief, acceptance, self-sabotage, and survival, wrapped in distortion thick enough to suffocate and lyrics sharp enough to bleed. The record opens with the instrumental “Flatline,” a bleak curtain rising on what feels like the soundtrack to a personal apocalypse. It quickly plunges into “Formaldehyde,” a brutal retelling of witnessing someone’s decline into suicide. Though written about another person, the song’s crushing weight comes from how that loss imprinted itself on the narrator. “We barely impacted each other in life,” Marc Phillips says, “but in death, he left a mark that felt deeper than final.”
From there, S.S.R.I never lets up. “Goddamn” captures the exhausting rhythm of living on a cycle of hope and collapse—a furious, almost desperate search for something real in the chaos. On “10-56,” the theme turns inward. It’s a song about getting what you always thought you wanted, only to feel it destroy you from the inside. “It’s everything I needed,” Phillips explains, “and that made it worse.”
But it’s “Alone” that feels like the album’s emotional core. Rooted in the moment of a breakup, it’s less about heartbreak and more about clarity—the realization that sometimes the loneliness you feel with someone is more suffocating than the loneliness without. In that recognition, there’s peace, but it’s the kind of peace that leaves scars.
The band returns to instrumentals with “Breath,” offering a sliver of space before the final blow. The closer, “Break,” is both an anthem and an epitaph—an existential gut-punch that challenges the very idea of what it means to pursue a dream that might be killing you. “Life isn’t supposed to be safe,” the band insists. “Find what you love and let it kill you.”
Produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered by Jason Groves, S.S.R.I is a wholly realized vision—uncompromising, loud, and emotionally devastating. The artwork, created by Josh Flowers, reflects the stark internal landscape the album traverses: raw, unfiltered, and impossible to ignore.
CROP has been making noise far beyond their Kentucky roots, with appearances at Ohio Doomed and Stoned, Maryland Doomfest, LegalizeLex, Magbar Musicfest, Holler of Doom, and RPM Fest. They’ve toured alongside HASHSTRONAUT, HORSEBURNER, TEMPLE OF THE FUZZ WITCH, and SHI, and shared stages with genre-defining acts like WEEDEATER, CONAN, REZN, BONGZILLA, and more. It’s no surprise LEO Weekly hailed them as “one of Kentucky’s best metal bands,” or that Riff Zealot called their music “a beautiful cacophony of pleasure and pain.”
As S.S.R.I prepares to launch, CROP will hit the road again with shows stretching from Asheville to Baltimore, culminating in a homecoming album release show in Lexington on September 5th at Al’s Bar.
To hear CROP is to feel something uncomfortably human—something bruised and bleeding, but still standing.
About CROP:
Formed in 2020 in Lexington, KY, CROP is a four-piece heavy band steeped in the grit of 90s grunge and sharpened by the weight of modern doom. Their sound is both relentless and reflective—massive walls of distortion colliding with lyrics that cut deep. With Marc Phillips on vocals, Zach Hunter on guitar, Braun Dabney on bass, and Andrew Beauvier on drums, CROP crafts songs that explore grief, isolation, existential dread, and the fight to stay human in an increasingly fractured world.
Their debut album CROP (2021) introduced audiences to their brutal honesty and raw sonic identity. With their follow-up S.S.R.I (2025, Third House Communications), the band has expanded both emotionally and sonically, delivering a record that is as vulnerable as it is heavy. Known for cathartic live performances and a growing presence on the underground festival circuit, CROP has shared stages with heavyweights like WEEDEATER, CONAN, and BONGZILLA, while earning praise from outlets like LEO Weekly and Riff Zealot.
For CROP, the music is a confrontation—a refusal to look away from the darkest corners of life, and an insistence that even pain deserves to be heard at full volume.
CROP is:
Marc Phillips – Vocals
Zach Hunter – Guitar
Braun Dabney – Bass
Andrew Beauvier – Drums
Water your ear-crop at:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/legalizecrop
Bandcamp: https://legalizecrop.bandcamp.com
E-Shop: http://paypal.me/legalizecrop
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/legalizecrop
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/legalizecrop/
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@legalizecrop
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3qJbqBgPgS3pzgOHAP1vOe?si=KjyxdkNASHOFONcbb861hw
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/crop/1659827624
Link to latest single ‘Formaldehyde’, via CROP’s Youtube Channel:
2. Morke [USA] - To Carry On (Releasing 10th October via True Cult Records)
Medieval black metal project Morke, led by sole member Eric Wing, will release its fourth full-length To Carry On on October 10 via True Cult Records.
Following 2024’s Forged in Steel and Love EP, which signalled a stylistic shift from atmospheric black metal to a more melodic, medieval-inspired sound dubbed “Castle Metal”, the new album delivers nine tracks steeped in ‘90s European melodic death metal riffs and modern atmospheric flourishes, channelling Dark Tranquillity, Dawn, A Canorous Quintet, and Obsequiae.
The record features guest contributions from Tanner Anderson (Obsequiae) and drummer CJ Yacoub, further expanding Morke’s majestic yet ferocious soundscape.
With To Carry On, Morke cements its place in the realm of “Castle Metal,” crafting a sound that is as majestic as it is ferocious.
GET MORKED, AT:
3. The Sorrow Of Being Immaculate [Wales, UK] - Suicide Forest (Releasing 26th September, via Drone Alone)
In the depths of a bitter Welsh winter, in an abandoned barn surrounded by broken trees and sodden earth, Suicide Forest began to take shape. With no neighbors, no lights, and only the distant hum of unsettled winds, THE SORROW OF BEING IMMACULATE set up a modest array of gear and started to write at full volume. The setting was as much a part of the record as the riffs themselves, each track soaked in the desolation and cold detachment of the landscape. This was not a place for warmth or clarity. It was a place to surrender to the weight of memory, to the slow, repetitive cycles of regret, and to the idea that music might not heal, but might at least bear witness.
Suicide Forest, set to be released by Drone Alone on September 26th, 2025, is the first full-length album from THE SORROW OF BEING IMMACULATE, an anonymous solo project steeped in instrumental doom, sludge, and drone. Where there might traditionally be lyrics, there is silence. Where there might be structure, there is repetition that borders on obsession. Each song loops like a thought you cannot escape. Each moment lingers just a little too long.
The album opens with "Suicide Forest," a track named after Japan's Aokigahara forest, long associated with death and spiritual unrest. The song was the last to be written and ultimately gave the album its title. The idea behind it is not exploitation or shock value, but immersion. The project’s purpose has always been to dwell inside uncomfortable emotional spaces. Not to glorify despair, but to let it echo long enough that it starts to lose its shape.
Other tracks extend this concept in different ways. "Sea of Trees," another name for Aokigahara, is built around a single crushing riff, slowly embellished with lead parts that rise and twist like the restless spirits often imagined in that forest. "30 Years of Nothing" is a steadily intensifying drone, a nod to watching others move forward while one remains stuck, and to the anger and confusion that can follow. It is not subtle. It is not meant to be.
"Oath of Decay" combines the grit of down-tuned sludge with ghostly vocal textures, a rare hint of the ethereal amid the album's otherwise punishing density. "Self-Immolation Plan" uses backwards guitars and distant samples to conjure something cold and disjointed, while "Misery" returns to a mantra-like riff that builds layer upon layer until the song is buried under itself.
At the center of the record is "Theendlesslowlevelbackgroundhumofanxiety," a nearly eight-minute reflection on the constant buzz of modern life. With interference and feedback layered over simple but insistent riffs, the track explores the idea that anxiety has become so normalized we no longer recognize it for what it is. It hums in the background like an appliance left on for too long.
"Winter Delusion" is a longform drone that captures the grey stasis of the season. It resists resolution. It just exists. "Funeral Home Drone" provides a moment of almost cartoonish morbidity, while still adhering to the album’s strict emotional palette. "The Eye of the Goat," short and taut, imagines the satanic figure of the goat not as a force of chaos, but as an observer of ruins, a passive witness to failure and futility.
The final track, "Suicide Forest (demo)," strips the album’s opening song to its core. Gone are the layered textures and eerie effects. What remains is skeletal and uncertain, a glimpse at the root before it was buried under distortion. It serves as both a beginning and an ending, a quiet reminder of where the album came from and how far it has travelled.
Suicide Forest was engineered and co-mixed by Mike Bannard at Safehouse Studios in Oxford. Everything else, from recording, to mastering, to cover art, was handled by THE SORROW OF BEING IMMACULATE.
There is no relief in this record. That is not its purpose. It is a document of personal reckoning, born in isolation and shaped by years of psychological sediment. Suicide Forest does not ask to be liked. It asks only to be entered. Whether or not you come out the other side is entirely up to you.
About THE SORROW OF BEING IMMACULATE:
THE SORROW OF BEING IMMACULATE is an anonymous solo project from Oxford, England, crafting bleak, instrumental sludge and drone since 2023. With no vocals, no public identity, and no live appearances, the music exists in complete isolation: just distortion, repetition, and emotional exhaustion.
Emerging from the Welsh countryside with the debut EP Church Music for Satanists in early 2024, THE SORROW OF BEING IMMACULATE quickly established a signature sound: hypnotic, heavy, and relentlessly minimal. The follow-up full-length, Suicide Forest, released by drone alone in 2025, pushed further into themes of anxiety, decay, and existential fatigue, blending guitar-driven doom with eerie drones and field-recorded interference.
Influenced by artists such as ELECTRIC WIZARD, SUNN O))), EARTH, and CARTER/TUTTI/VOID, the project explores psychological weight through slow repetition and spiritual dissonance. There are no lyrics because nothing more needs to be said. The riffs are the message.
For those drawn to the darker corners of sound, where catharsis is earned through endurance, THE SORROW OF BEING IMMACULATE offers a solitary descent.