Review: Sallow Moth – Mossbane Lantern

Style: brutal death metal, progressive metal, progressive rock, jazz fusion (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Cynic, Wormed, Edge of Sanity, Primus, Blood Incantation
Country: Texas, United States
Release date: 1 August 2025

I’d been aware of Sallow Moth since their last album Stasis Cocoon got shared on a few Magic: The Gathering subreddits thanks to its ample references to popular cards via its song titles and lyrics, but in my infinite holistic wisdom wrote the band off as too intense and weird for my liking. Well, my taste has changed a lot since 2021, and I now find myself a connoisseur of the weird and intense and can now recognize Sallow Moth’s most recent release Mossbane Lantern as a delightful surprise in an otherwise trying year for progressive music. 

Continuing the trend of MTG references began on their previous albums, Sallow Moth has upped the ante by creating a suite of playable homebrew artifacts¹ in accordance with the tracklist on their newest album Mossbane Lantern. Employing a hyper-modern interpretation of brutal death metal replete with the burping vocals, chromatic slam sections, and searing pinch harmonics that fans of bands like Afterbirth, Wormhole, and Artificial Brain love and have come to expect, Sallow Moth distinguishes itself from its brethren with the accoutrements that it incorporates into that core sound. Much like last year’s Absolute Elsewhere from Blood Incantation, Mossbane Lantern is ground zero for the prized amalgam of death metal and progressive rock, but where Blood Incantation often split those styles into clearly separate movements Sallow Moth throws everything at the listener all at once. The final product sounds something like those memes that show someone listening to the Bible translated to Chinese in one ear and Mozart at 2x speed in the other, but instead the audio is comprised of brutal death metal, jazz fusion-esque prog rock, and pages upon pages of someone’s Magic: The Gathering fan-fiction. To some, that may be the soundtrack to the ninth sphere of Phyrexia, but for those willing to glimpse the unthinkable, Sallow Moth may just have what you need.

In the combination of disparate genres, many bands often adopt the mere aesthetics of those genres and lose the heart of what makes them great; Sallow Much engages in no such faithless looting. With hooks that latch onto you like a skullclamp, and riffs for days of both the brutal and proggy variety, Mossbane Lantern is a lot catchier than it may sound on the tin. Still, it’s unlike most music based on the sheer quantity of ideas it delivers in any given section; when I first heard opener “Gutscape Navigator,” I felt as though I was drinking from a firehose, scarce few riffs or fills actually hitting home, but as the album progressed and my understanding of it evolved, I began to see a painstakingly crafted scrapbook of influences and muses instead of a heaping mish mash of disjoint ideas. Listening to Mossbane Lantern feels like looking back through a scrapbook of Sallow Moth’s musical history, and you can feel the care that he has for his music and subject matter through the attention to detail alone.

While individual instrument performances are not the focus of Mossbane Lantern, each instrument making up the album’s death metal core more than holds its own. The rhythm section, comprised of programmed drums (although you’d never be able to tell they were) and a wickedly gnarled bass sound that seems to switch between fretless and fretted tones on a whim, plows forward through walls of synthesizer and orchestral implements, while the banefire-esque guitars sweep and sear their way through riffs melodic and lumbering alike. Regularly, the guitars will enter with a completely new yet equally heavy tone just to emphasize a single riff or lead and then fade away, and it’s these brief moments of clear intent that keep Mossbane Lantern from devolving into utter chaos. 

Across Mossbane Lantern, Sallow Moth toes the line between order and chaos and for the most part nails the give and take in dynamics necessary to support an album with such intense peaks. I found my thoughts seized, as moments gave way to longer ideas, individual songs lost their meaning as a useful tool for delineation, and the tracks flowed neatly into each other both sonically and emotionally. Some may find it difficult to truly engage with an album so demanding of its listener, but I found it a relief to listen to an album with the confidence to throw so many ideas at me and with the compositional and production skills to keep it meaningful. Look out for Mossbane Lantern on any list I put out come year’s end.

Recommended tracks: Icegorger Gauntlets, Psionic Battery, Aethercave Boots
You may also like: Afterbirth, Artificial Brain, Memorrhage, Warforged, Wormhole
Final verdict: 8.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: I, Voidhanger Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Sallow Moth is:
– Garry Brents (all instruments, vocals)
With guests:
– Ashbreather (additional gang vocals on track 5’s chorus)
– Chipped Topaz (all composition on track 8)
– Cory Peterson (additional guttural vocals on track 7)
– Dave Norman (buried layer of screams on tracks 1, 3, 5, 6, and 7)
– Emily Noelle (high gang chorus vocals on track 5’s chorus)
– G. E. F. (additional low vocals on track 6)
– Manic Dream Girl (falsetto vocals on track 1, breakbeat stem on track 3)
– Nathan Kwon (additional gang vocals on track 5’s chorus)
– Orion Stephens (solos at 3:34 and 4:04 on track 6)
– Riccardo Benedini (solo at 1:15 on track 4, solo at 6:37 on track 6)
– Steve Wiener (steel-string acoustic guitar outro on track 4, additional clean/yelling vocals on track 6)
– Sylvie Pickle (additional guttural vocals on track 6)
– Warsaw (additional high vocals on track 5’s chorus)

1. If you purchased the deluxe vinyl edition, you’d even receive the eight custom cards as proxies, a fact I regret only learning after they had sold out. ↩︎