While the intention of New York’s Cowardice may be to melt the heart, instead they rip it out completely.
The New York five-piece (Julian Cardazone, Nick Zwiren, Mark Guiliano, Chris Ward and Stephen Edwards), harness Thou’s doom-laden Heathen-era aesthetic. In doing so, they master the brand of sluggish, heart-wrenching riff-a-rolla that excavates to new emotional depths across the landscapes of metal.
Like Thou—whom they covered on their 2022 Fealty EP with Into the Marshlands—it’s questionable as to whether you would even consider Cowardice a metal band, per se. Seemingly drawing from a punk hybrid and adding slow, crushing landslides of noise, while Cowardice had spent six years in the wilderness since their debut, Without Condolence, prior to the Fealty EP, it’s yet another part of their make-up that completely goes against the grain. No, they hadn’t faded into obscurity, instead burrowed away meticulously plotting what would become Atavist: their sensational double album.
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Atavist touches on all the facets by which great records are measured. A bastion in the pantheon led by the hard-nosed, Cowardice shatter the rules and principles most other bands go by. It’s about finding that moment, and that’s why Atavist is as much a psychedelic record as it is punk, metal, or anything else.
From the gruelling opener To the Hilt of Humanity, it’s apparent you’re tangled up in the tripwire that’s set all across their sound world. It’s the kind of open chord emotional force delivered from the edge of a cliff. That same towering glory Matt Pike has dispensed in Sleep, and here Cowardice produce something that cascades across the canyon with methodical builds-up and eye-watering tonality. Cloisters makes this one-two combo one of the best delivered this year, as lurching riffs and low-end heaviness sees Cowardice’s sheer menace embody sludge metal as we know it.
Cowardice - AtavistAnd the tone gets darker with Unforgotten Key and later during Diminutive Principle. Both cold-eyed dirges that are like travelling through a hell storm at break-neck speed. Meanwhile, the crunching groan of Eastern Woodland Reverie creates a haunting imagery, with quiet/loud dynamics that feel like you’re being stalked in your dreams by a minotaur.
As the title suggests, Clairvoyance Anxiety sees Cowardice mixing darkness with humour, feeding into the contradictive nature this band feeds off. The track itself, a is belch from the void where the worlds of punk and metal submerge.
On Annulment, Cowardice deliver something you could have imagined ISIS carving out during in the Oceanic / Panopticon days, albeit at quarter-speed. It’s the kind of vibrant sludge metal that effortlessly moves through rugged marshlands to find new ground.
And that new ground is where Hall of Mages awaits. The epic closing track that is 17-plus minutes of lumbering majesty that reaches the summit. While many bands work up to a moment like Hall of Mages, in Cowardice’s case, it’s yet another grinding hit from an album that contains many.
With Atavist, Cowardice are the untamable hell-raisers expelled from the abyss. There have been vital records that have occupied shelves and changed the lives of those who care to indulge, and Atavist is yet another. Whilst epic, Atavist isn’t a grandiose statement. It’s too frayed, too raw, too hard-edged to be that. It ticks all the boxes of that list buried in the subconscious, alleviating those unspoken verities. It’s the record you’d want to make.
Atavist is out now via Burning World Records (EU) and Riff Merchant Records (US). Purchase from Bandcamp.
