Style: Stoner rock, progressive metal (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Mastodon, Elder, Green Lung, Weedpecker
Country: United States, Tennessee
Release date: 31 October 2025

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It’s a not-so-secret around the Subway that we try not to dole out too many high scores. In theory, our score distribution should be a bell curve. Have you given out too many 8s recently? Better pick something at random to review from the promo heap and hope you don’t love it, because Andy gripes and Christopher hands out the beatings if you’re enjoying music too much. Truth be told, that’s why I picked Crucible & Ruin. I have a love-it-or-bored-to-tears-by-it relationship with stoner rock, so there was a real chance this one would “meh” me to death. How many albums full of down-tuned pentatonic riffs and nasally vocal lines singing about weed-induced stellar visions can one possibly hear before it all starts sounding the same?

As it turns out, at least one more than I previously thought. Though Howling Giant’s Crucible & Ruin treads the cosmic and psychedelic path of many a stoner rock release, it does so with enough carefully crafted ideas and evasion of many of the genre’s trappings that it becomes a joy to spin again and again. The album is the story of creation and collapse—individuals, civilizations, and higher powers who shape worlds only to be undone by primordial chaos. It’s the sound of something ahem giant being forged, broken, and remembered across eons.

Earlier this year, I reviewed another stoner rock release: Sergeant Thunderhoof’s The Ghost of Badon Hill. Though I enjoyed it on the whole, my main gripe was that a lot of the songs meandered past the eight-minute mark without enough variation to justify their runtimes. Crucible & Ruin does not fall into that snare, injecting its four to (almost) seven-minute songs with seamless transitions, shifting riffs, and killer drum fills that keep things lively. When Howling Giant does flirt with repetition, they have the sense to let a song end before it overstays its welcome. Take “Melchor’s Bones,” for example. A slow, groovy, off-rhythm riff (that provides some of the prog credentials on the album) slides into a plaintive voiceover section, transitioning from there into a bridge containing my favorite vocal moment on the entire album, with a bit of call-and-response in its cadence and melody. The song then revisits the opening riff briefly before bowing out gracefully. Nothing repeats needlessly, nothing drags. You’re simply ready for the next track.

Vocal harmonies carry most of the melodic weight on Crucible & Ruin, and the band’s three contributing vocalists use them with smart variation. Where other groups might let off the gas a little, Howling Giant really lean into this aspect of their sound to great effect. “Beholder I: Downfall” is a fantastic vocal showcase. Its verse unfolds into a glorious chant ranging from the low to high ends of the members’ voices. “Archon” is no slouch either, exploding off the bat with a resonant accord befitting the grandeur of the album’s themes.

Lyrically, Crucible & Ruin contains a throughline of mythic meditations on formation and cataclysm. Throughout the album, godlike beings “shap[e] essence into form” and “min[e] broken constellations” among other divine acts of creation and annihilation, while mortals “[speak] our will into form” and reshape land with fire and steel. Observing and recording all of this is the titular character of the track “Archivist,” preserving these myths told at different scales. Even when the hooks aren’t as sharp—”Hunter’s Mark,” for instance, doesn’t quite have the staying power of the album’s highlights—the overarching theme keeps everything connected.

From there, the riffs themselves are as much storytellers as the lyrics. “Melchor’s Bones” embodies the slow, sledgehammer groove of the genre, while “Scepter and Scythe” has a more animated and energetic flair. There’s a compunction I feel in enjoying a lot of these riffs, lead lines, and solos so much. On paper, I can’t make a case for them being as standout as I think they are—going back to my complaint about samey downtuned pentatonic riffs throughout the genre—yet I find myself doing vocal mimics of a lot of the guitar parts as I’m going about my day. That must be because Howling Giant inject enough pizzazz into a few of the rhythms to lend them some prog legitimacy, keeping them fresh and giving them a personality that’s hard to shake.

Crucible & Ruin is a groove-driven stoner rock record that leans more stoner than prog. However, with so much interesting instrumentation, beefy but not indulgent song length, and lyrical connective tissue between the tracks, the record may just appeal to prog heads as much as stoners. As the former, I feel I can say that with some authority, but I’ll leave the latter for the rest of you.

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Recommended tracks: Archon, Beholder I: Downfall, Melchor’s Bones
You may also like: Sergeant Thunderhoof, Bask, Slung
Final verdict: 7.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Magnetic Eye Records

Howling Giant is:
– Tom Polzine (guitar, vocals)
– Zach Wheeler (drums, vocals)
– Sebastian Baltes (bass, vocals)
– Adrian Lee Zambrano (guitars, synthesizers)
With guests:
– Kim Wheeler (additional synths)
– Adam Nohe (additional percussion)

1. Interesting factoid: Susan is Tom Polzine’s mother. ↩︎