Style: Sludge metal, black metal, avant-garde metal (Harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Neurosis, Amenra, Thou
Country: United States
Release date: 6 February 2026

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All art is in some way transformative, alchemizing feelings, experiences, and even other pieces of art into a mirror reflecting the creator’s perspective. Art recontextualizes, retells, relives; even the lowly album review aims to open dialogue between source material and audience. But what makes a piece truly transformative? James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses is an archetype of transformation, draping Homer’s Odyssey in endless layers of obfuscation, stream-of-consciousness, and irony. At the end of this metamorphic chain lie New Hampshire’s Agenbite Misery, who aim to reimagine Ulysses in a brew of experimental, blackened sludge metal. Can debut release Remorse of Conscience unite old contexts and new creations?

“Telemachian Echoes” opens the record in medias res: faint spoken word and a lightning-fast neocrust assault throw us in the middle off Stephen Dedalus’¹ woes, establishing both the towering drama and venomous aggression that color Remorse of Conscience. Thick, growling riffs are explored in numerous settings accompanied by three different types of harsh vocals: bellowing gutturals, manic spitting, and throat-tearing shrieks. Spoken word appears commonly throughout, recounting conversations and key lines from Ulysses. Lyrically, the record stays faithful to the novel, weaving impossibly dense knots of prose into byzantine song structures.

For all its density, complexity, and strangeness, Remorse of Conscience goes down the gullet surprisingly easily. “Bellwether and Swine” is refined in its single-minded approach, constantly reshuffling a nasty, sludgy groove through several rhythmic and stylistic contexts. Conversely, “Circe” is ferocious and scatterbrained in its black metal, mirroring Ulysses’ hallucinogenic chapter of the same name. The despondent “Mnesterophonia” diverges wildly from constructed musical forms with reverb-laden, heavily-textured guitar improv in its final third, reminiscent of Sumac’s “World of Light”. 

Other songs show glimmers of brilliance, such as the nightmarish shrieks among heartbreaking dirges in “A Charitable View of Temporary Insanity” and the swaggering fury of “Telemachian Echoes”. “Whatness of Allhorse”, on the other hand, indulges in an off-kilter industrial metal beat that constantly interrupts the track’s momentum. Its synth accents add a melodic through-line and balmy texture that leads to a dramatic climax, but these elements aren’t quite enough to redeem the more grating elements. Although this is likely an apt representation of Dedalus’ inability to move past the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis, the song focuses so heavily on aligning musical narrative with the novel that it forgoes some enjoyability in the process.

“Mnesterophonia” balances these two ideals more gracefully. The track is a mournful dirge following the rambling inner monologue of Molly Bloom; pangs of frightening, dissonant death metal creep through its conclusion while Molly recalls one of the happiest moments of her life. Agenbite Misery gleefully play with irony, closing the circle of subversion that Joyce began drawing in 1922. Dire dramatics dot the canvas of “Cascara Sagrada”, which chronicles an utterly mundane slice of Leopold Bloom’s life as he contemplates breakfast, observes ‘gelid light and gentle summer air’, and uses the restroom among some of the most twisted riffs of the record.

Given the glacial pace at which events unfold in Ulysses, perhaps Remorse of Conscience’s most radical act of irony is how it rushes through its story beats. Agenbite Misery try to get as much across as possible in an hour-long runtime; as a consequence, plot points are hurriedly ushered along in an attempt to jam such a dense work into a comparatively small time frame. Essential moments—such as the deification of Bloom at the end of “Bellwether and Swine”, the union of Dedalus and Bloom in “Circe”, and Molly’s extended monologues in “Mnesterophonia”—are chronicled appropriately, but the relationships between these characters are only hinted at. Though one likely couldn’t reverse-engineer The Odyssey from Ulysses alone, trying to piece together Ulysses from Remorse of Conscience is even more difficult, as crucial ideas are glossed over and the material becomes estranged from The Odyssey. Both the music and the lyrics require more space to unfold organically should Agenbite Misery want to fully reticulate their artistic vision.

Of course, that may be too much to ask of a record just shy of an hour—to stuff the entirety of two mammoth literary pieces into a single album is likely a task too Herculean (Odyssean?) for anyone.² Moreover, Remorse of Conscience hits many important literary details: the irony that drenched Joyce’s masterpiece lives on through Agenbite Misery’s intense dramatization of the mundane, and a stream-of-consciousness signature is channeled through the record’s psychedelic, often intractable songwriting. Yet still, these details cannot stand on their own, and the Homerian undertones of Ulysses are necessary to hold the record’s scaffolding together. Remorse of Conscience engages throughout, featuring rollicking sludge grooves and mercurial black metal in a deliciously caustic package; Agenbite Misery just need to step back and allow themselves time to breathe in the Aegean air. Too much time reading Titbits in a mildewy outhouse isn’t good for your heath, after all.

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Recommended tracks: Bellwether and Swine, A Charitable View of Temporary Insanity, Mnesterophonia
You may also like: Sumac, Hell, Mizmor, Adrift
Final verdict: 7.5/10

Related links: Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Agenbite Misery is:
– Sam Graff: guitars
– Cam Netland: bass
– Adam Richards: drums

1. Dedalus is one of Ulysses’ three central characters, including Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly. ↩︎
2. Which is extra rich coming from the guy that boils down records into a few hundred words. In the words of my cowriter Andy: ‘While a picture is worth a thousand words, an hour of music is worth about seven hundred and fifty.’ ↩︎