Soothsayer’s The Unbinding Review: Five Songs, Zero Mercy (Sadly)

Soothsayer’s The Unbinding swaps endless fog for sharper violence—still doom, just with teeth. It’s brutal, emotional, and annoyingly demanding.

Let’s be honest: this album doesn’t want to be “played.”

It wants to be endured—in the best way and occasionally in the “why did I do this to myself on a weeknight?” way.

I remember how Echoes Of The Earth hit me back in 2021: like stumbling into an abandoned building where someone left a horror soundtrack playing, then welded the doors shut and piped in post-metal chaos for fun. It was innovative, sure. It was also the kind of “experience” that can leave your brain feeling like it’s leaking out of your ears. Sometimes that’s exactly what doom is for. But that debut also had those long, everything-everywhere-all-at-once stretches that felt less like immersion and more like an endurance test with a dim prize at the end.

The Unbinding keeps the harrowing atmosphere, but it stops treating structure like an optional feature. That’s the first real sign this band has leveled up: not by getting “nicer,” but by getting clearer about how they want to crush you.

Track 1: “Eroding The Sky” kicks the door in—and then rearranges the room

The album opens with “Eroding The Sky” and, for a second, I genuinely wondered if I’d put on the wrong record. It starts as an all-out black metal assault—rage-forward, no warm-up, no polite intro. Liam Hughes comes in furious, and Gerard O’Callaghan answers with blast beats that don’t “support” the song so much as try to outrun it.

This is where the album makes its first big statement: Soothsayer aren’t just “atmospheric death doom” anymore—they’re using that label as a trapdoor. They pull you in with violence, then drop you into something slower and uglier.

The track collapses into an eerie, atmospheric death-doom middle passage—cold air, wide space, that “something is breathing behind you” kind of quiet. And then it rebuilds into a speeding black metal coda like it’s proving a point: they can do dynamics now, not just density.

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect: this push-pull between horrifying weight and gloomy atmosphere is controlled across the record. That balance wasn’t always there before. On the debut, it sometimes felt like the band had too many ideas and wanted you to survive all of them. Here, the ideas are still intense—but they’re arranged like they mean something.

Track 2: “Sooner Acceptance” slows down—but it doesn’t soften

After that opener, “Sooner Acceptance” feels like the album taking a breath—except the breath is still full of smoke.

It calms the pace, at least at first, starting from a stark, reverb-heavy post-metal space where the edges blur and the room feels too big. Then it grows organically into a colossal death doom monster, the kind that doesn’t “drop” so much as arrive, huge and unavoidable.

Hughes is the center of gravity here. His performance moves between twisted growls, pleading yells, and desperate screams, and the shifts don’t feel theatrical—they feel like someone losing control in real time. Despite the sheer weight of the sound, the emotion is obvious, and it doesn’t come off like vague “darkness.” The lyrics explicitly go into grief and loss after the death of a family member, and that context changes how the track lands. When you hear a line like

“Though battered and broken down, you made it back to sacred ground,”

it stops being generic misery and starts sounding like a specific wound.

An arguable take? This is the album’s real “hook,” even though it’s not catchy. The opener might be the flex, but “Sooner Acceptance” is the first time the record looks you in the eye.

And yeah—this is where I revised my first impression. Early on, I assumed The Unbinding was just going to be “the same band, louder and meaner.” But this track proves it’s actually more human than the last one. Still punishing, just more pointed.

The middle of the album: the band finally lets the weird influences show

From here, the record starts showing a wider range of influences—or maybe they always had them, but now they’re confident enough to leave fingerprints.

“Endless Shesha” uses funeral doom like a haunted hallway

“Endless Shesha” has touches of funeral doom dotted throughout, and those moments matter because they aren’t there to “add variety.” They’re there to give you a different kind of dread—slower, more spacious, like the song is staring at you instead of chasing you.

It’s a haunting respite from the aural onslaught elsewhere, but I wouldn’t call it comforting. It’s the musical version of sitting down because your legs gave out, not because you’re finally safe.

Arguable claim: these funeral-doom passages do more damage than the faster parts because they give you time to process what’s happening. Speed distracts; slowness accuses.

“The Vine” breaks into a waltz—and somehow that’s the most threatening part

Then there’s “The Vine,” and the moment it breaks into that swinging waltz, the album shows its most bizarre—and weirdly effective—idea.

It comes across like an empowering march into hell. Not “triumphant” in a clean, heroic way—more like you’re choosing doom with your shoulders back because pretending you’re brave is the only remaining tool. The whole section sounds like it’s constantly on the edge of collapsing, like the floorboards are splitting under the rhythm, but it somehow manages not to crash.

If I have a mild gripe anywhere, it’s here: that waltz section is so striking that I kept wanting the band to push it even further, to make it uglier or more deranged. They flirt with the ledge, and part of me wishes they’d lean harder. Still, the restraint might be the point—the album doesn’t want to become a circus, even when it’s doing something theatrically strange.

Arguable claim: “The Vine” is the album’s smartest track because it smuggles instability into something that should feel orderly.

Closer: “A Vague Shimmer” is thirteen minutes of the band tying the knot tight

By the time “A Vague Shimmer” arrives, the album has trained you to expect shifts—so it uses that expectation against you.

It’s a thirteen-minute epic that somehow pulls together everything that came before into a cohesive whole: crawling funeral doom, post-metal sparseness, shape-shifting vocals, towering riffs, and pummeling bass. It doesn’t feel like a “medley” or a victory lap. It feels like the album closing a fist.

This is also where the band’s growth shows most clearly. On earlier material, those big extended sections could feel like being trapped in a room with too many speakers. Here, the length feels earned. The transitions land. The heaviness isn’t just heaviness—it’s tension being managed and released.

Arguable claim: if the album has a thesis, it’s in this closer—because it proves they can combine the styles without sounding like they’re flipping through playlists.

The big catch: The Unbinding demands everything, and it doesn’t apologize

Now, don’t misread me: The Unbinding is not an easy listen. It’s challenging, devastating, cathartic, and immensely heavy, and it stays that way even when it slows down.

It’s only five songs, but it still manages to say and do more than plenty of extreme metal bands manage across whole careers. That’s not me being polite—that’s me noticing how much intent is packed into each track’s structure and emotional pressure.

But it also comes with a requirement: you can’t really do this album in “fits and starts.” I mean, you can, but it won’t hit the same. The record is too demanding of your attention. Its relentless nature will absolutely be too much for some people, especially anyone who wants extreme metal to function as background energy.

Fans of atmospheric death doom, though? This uncompromising, experimental approach is exactly where the strength is. The band sounds like it’s evolving beyond its previous parameters—not by abandoning its identity, but by sharpening it until it cuts cleaner.

I’m not 100% sure every listener will hear the same “progress” I hear—someone could argue the debut’s chaos was the appeal. Fair. But to my ears, this is what it sounds like when a band stops merely surviving its own ideas and starts directing them.

Artwork

Release note

The Unbinding is out now via Apocalyptic Witchcraft.

Where to follow

If you want to keep up with SOOTHSAYER, they’re on Facebook (official band page).

Conclusion

The Unbinding doesn’t try to be friendly, and that’s the whole point. It takes the suffocating atmosphere of Soothsayer’s earlier work and finally gives it shape—black-metal speed, death-doom heft, funeral-doom crawl, and post-metal emptiness, all stitched together like the same nightmare seen from different angles.

Our verdict: People who like their atmospheric death doom structured but still feral will actually love this—especially if you enjoy albums that demand full attention and refuse to “resolve.” If you need riffs to entertain you every thirty seconds or you treat music like a productivity tool, this will feel like being trapped in a slow-moving storm you didn’t order.

FAQ

• Is The Unbinding really only five songs long?
  Yes—five tracks, but each one is built to sprawl, escalate, and linger. It doesn’t feel slight; it feels concentrated.
• What’s the most aggressive moment on the album?
  The opening of “Eroding The Sky” hits like a black metal ambush before the song mutates into doomier territory.
• Does the album have emotional weight or is it just heavy?
  It has real emotional bite—“Sooner Acceptance” explicitly tackles grief and loss, and the vocal performance sounds painfully invested.
• Where should a new listener start?
  Start with “Sooner Acceptance” if you want the emotional center, or “Eroding The Sky” if you want the album’s fastest, most hostile entry point.
• Is this an album you can play casually?
  Not really. It’s the kind of record that punishes half-listening—and, honestly, that seems intentional.

If you’re the type who bonds with album art as much as the sound, it’s worth grabbing a favorite album-cover poster for your wall too—quiet proof you survived the listen. You can browse prints at our store: https://www.architeg-prints.com