Thou - Umbilical

I remember how I felt the first time I listened to Thou’s Heathen. 

Starting with the rising feedback of Free Will, the album seemingly made time stand still and Mumbai’s afternoon air curdle. 

The guitar tone on the first power chord stab about two minutes in – the crunch on it, the grit. The way the vocals pierced through the racket the band made. Ultimately, the cohesiveness of the band’s groove.

I have yet to hear an underwhelming Thou record. A decade after Heathen, Thou’s 2024 release, Umbilical, is just as fantastic a representation of Thou’s brand of sludgy doom. 

Or is it doomy sludge?

There may be no genre of music more obsessed with the minute differences between its various subgenres than metal.

Consequently, there may be no genre of music with more subgenres than metal. 

In the primordial soup from which the 3 am music nerd club would later, M. specialised in bringing the boys the latest from the world of metal subgenres.

Branching out from his fields of specialisation – melodic death metal and folk metal – M. brought the boys who would later later prostrate around a Dell XPS playing poorly-shot music videos with non-linear narratives and far fewer than a million views the following gifts. Kalmah and swamp metal, Korpiklaani’s Happy Little Boozer and whatever specific subgenre of Finnish folk metal that was, the bizarre world of Tolkien metal, and many, many more such discoveries. 

The oughts were coming to an end, and internet-based nerds were reaching the tailend of their forum era. B. was all over .ru forums, amassing an ungodly collection of black metal stored on stacks of hard drives, shared with the whole university through his DC++ server. N. was on 4chan, nibbling around the edges of /mu/ while dodging the early days of /pol/’s descent into proto-QAnon conspiracy theories. And I was on last.fm. And /r/listentothis. And the Quietus and Pitchfork. 

Thou is one of the rare [insert subgenre] metal bands that can inhabit what each of these worlds have become today. Umbilical, and its standout tracks House of Ideas and the Promise, are proof.