Style: Post-black metal, post-hardcore (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Agriculture, Deafheaven, early Lantlos
Country: USA
Release date: 6 March 2026

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“In metal, there’s a tendency to mistake aggression for honesty, volume for depth. To confuse the performance of darkness with its actual weight.” So says Bosse-de-Nage’s Bandcamp page, at least. The Californian quartet’s blend of the black metal aggression with the simpler compositional sensibility of post-hardcore is capped off by a stream-of-consciousness approach to vocals and lyricism. Hidden Fires Burn Hottest eschews technicality in favour of relatively repetitive riffs and judicious drumming. But does that make for a more honest and deep album than the genre’s average?

The answer is no. Three minutes of any of the eight main tracks of the album (the other two are interludes) is all you really need to hear to understand Hidden Fires Burn Hottest. Syncopated riffs grate in their repetition, the drumming consists of inert blast beats and endless snare rolling. Breaks come, such as the rather soothing piano outro on “Where to Now?” or the ambient interlude on “Frenzy”, but, by and large, Hidden Fires Burn Hottest makes the rather brave decision to write the same song eight times. 

This isn’t to abjure Bosse-de-Nage’s sparse approach to instrumentation on principle. It’s simply that the jangling chords, rolling drumwork, and endless hi-hat preening do little to differentiate individual songs from one another. This could be said of many a band who define themselves via vocal performance, which is unfortunately Bosse-de-Nage’s downfall. The continuous prose style of the writing is reflected in the delivery, which unfurls as a recitation in pained tones with no real thought given to the rhythm of the prose. Ultimately, this leads to a sense of disconnection between vocals and instrumentation. Delivered in such uniform fashion, none of the performance stands out, none of the lyrics are elevated above one another, and the vocals become yet another persistently annoying texture in an unvarying record. 

It’s unfortunate because the Lydia Davis-esque flash fiction¹ style of the lyrics is genuinely striking. Short contemplative paragraphs on topics like a room that can’t exist but does, or the reaction of townsfolk to the washing up of a whale on the beach drip with eerie melancholy. “Mementos” depicts a man dismembering himself piece by piece and laying his body to rest with his deceased beloved in order to later regrow—a macabre yet darkly comic premise. However, when stretched out in a punishing monotone over a repetitious six minutes or so, any intrigue this or other microfictions might have had is consummately destroyed. 

None of this is to say that there’s nothing on Hidden Fires Burn Hottest that can impress, but often ideas that are appealing on their merits become victims of the album’s general faults. Moments of lead guitar, for example, are pushed as far back in the mix as possible—take the urgent slides on “Mementos” or the chaotic solo closing “In the Name of the Moth”, both of which become textural easter eggs over focal points. It’s an interesting choice, one I might be more inclined to praise in an album that didn’t desperately need focal points to break up the monotony. The ecstatic major-key riffing of “No Such Place” also makes a welcome change—and perhaps an unusual one for a song about an impossible room—but ideas like this in isolation either pass too quickly to really take effect or are pushed beyond tolerability by the need to hammer home the same riffs over and over.  

All this means that the album’s two interludes, “With a Shrug” and “Triangular Dream”, stand out simply by dint of being much-needed reprieves from the record at large. Though, the reprise of a repetitive spoken word phrase—’I assure you’—from “No Such Place” on the latter hardly puts it in good standing with me. To this end, “Immortality Project” stands as the album’s highlight. After a long ambient fade-in with glitching noises, a brief spoken word recitation is backed by moody thrums of bass and gentle strumming that never progresses beyond the natural life of the idea—unlike compositional choices across the record, this song doesn’t persistently repeat to the point where all it can ever do is frustrate. “Hidden Fires Burn Hottest doesn’t explain itself,” the band claim on Bandcamp, “It just insists.” Or, as Peter Griffin would say: It insists upon itself. 

If Hidden Fires Burn Hottest is annoying—and I assure you, it is—Bosse-de-Nage’s self-conscious hipster aesthetic, their iconoclastic posturing, may well garner them a certain kind of audience: the kids who enthusiastically rate and review metal on RateYourMusic and seem to have intentionally sought a taste antithetical to that of the scene at large. There’s a tendency in metal to mistake snobbishness for originality, repetition for entrancement. To confuse monotonous recitation of microfictions for a compelling vocal performance… and Bosse-de-Nage embody it, I assure you. 

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Recommended tracks: Immortality Project
You may also like: Ashenspire, Liturgy, Basalte, Oathbreaker
Final verdict: 4/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: The Flenser

Bosse-de-Nage is:
– Bryan Manning (vocals)
– Michael Smith-Brenden (guitars)
– Drew Bonel (bass)
– Harry Cantwell (drums)

1. On the bright side, reviewing this album has convinced me to try some Lydia Davis. Here’s an example of a full Davis story. ↩︎