If you like Sleep, you’ll love Bludgeoning Simulations by GHOLD.
Bludgeoning Simulations starts with a momentary clearing of space before swinging in with sledgehammer force. This is metal that’s not interested in speed, virtuosity or polish, but rather a slow heaviness that’s ritualistic to its core. The opening track Cauterise is deliberately crude, feeling tribal rather than technical with two voices pitched a fifth apart like an incantation, leaning into major intervals in an unusual choice for music this heavy, subtly pulling the sound away from standard sludge expectations.
This music sounds ancient, as if it predates genre entirely, with resolutely messy production and distorted echoing noise everywhere, as the mass of sound presses in on you on Lowest, maintaining the same slow, bludgeoning pace. The album then takes its first major left turn with Place To Bless A Shadow, a long atmospheric piece that’s less a metal track than abstract soundtrack work evoking dungeons and subterranean rituals, moving at a glacial pace if it moves at all. Fallen Debris snaps the listener back into recognisable sludge territory, if only to remind you for four minutes that this is still a metal record. It’s comparatively direct and pacey, reaffirming the album’s crushing low end with thick simple riffs. The record’s most extreme experiment arrives with Leaves, a nine-minute drone piece that abandons metal entirely, and feels like wind moving through ruins, with dub-like effects dragging the percussion into long, groaning echoes. The closing track Rude, Awaken returns to guitar and drums, though space and silence dominate and the vocals once again take on that incantatory quality. This is metal drawn directly from the Black Sabbath school of riff worship, not an accessible record, but metal as ritual built around repetition and texture. A deeply satisfying, head-twisting experience.