Style: Nu metal, trap, industrial metal, alternative pop, progressive metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Sleep Token, Rammstein, Limp Bizkit, Korn
Country: United States
Release date: 20 April 2026

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If there’s one thing that keeps the spirit of prog alive, it’s ambition. The genre thrives on interminable concept albums and questionable usage of smooth jazz saxophones. Dream Theater’s The Astonishing sucks for a myriad of reasons, but nobody can accuse that one of being as paint by numbers as their other recent output. Even at the very start of modern prog, people hated the noisy free jazz section of “Moonchild” by King Crimson, yet the song wouldn’t be as boundary pushing without it. A love of atypical, outsider music unites prog fans, and that requires artists bold enough to try something different. Brandon Matthew Sussman, the man behind Long Island’s Skrik, is clearly ambitious; that’s the last nice thing I can say about Songs for Coming Forth by Day. 

Working with a nu metal foundation, Skrik builds up a fortress of impenetrably bad music. I’ll start with the lyrics since they provide a slight inclination of what may have gone wrong: On second track “Absurd”—after a long rant about his potential to get a bigger bag on his own than with the record labels—Sussman describes mixing DMT and weed in a golden bong. I assume this entire record was written during a psychotic episode caused by that mixture. The lyrics range from really bad to downright awful, with the Limp Bizkit influence coming in strongly on the poeticisms of “The Scream”; for example, “My name is Skrik / Living shriek / I’m the Scream! / First consciousness to truly get the Core of what that painting means.” One exception to the rule exists, though, as “Snakes” has the best stanza in music history: “OH / fuck / y’all / SNAKES.” Sussman’s lyrics have all the bravado of a talented emcee with none of the charisma nor skill, and essentially every line on the album rhymes with another to grating effect—lyricism can go beyond the level of elementary school “poetry” rhyming.

But it is the delivery of these lyrics which really hurts. Sussman tries all manner of vocal styles on Songs for Coming Forth by Day: scatting like Korn (“Machina”), rapping in a trap style but with harsh vocals (“Absurd”), crooning like a Sleep Token wanna-be (“Memento Mori Love Song,” “Creatures of Habit”), singing like a muppet (“Egohead”), and even screeching like King Diamond (“Toad in the Mud”). Besides the hilarity of the last one, deciding which style I hate most on Songs for Coming Forth by Day is difficult. The rap and Korn-y bits are produced so loudly that making out lyrics becomes an impossible challenge at times, and the feeling that Sussman is chewing on his own tongue while trying to rap doesn’t help. But as annoying and frustrating as the incomprehensible harsh-vocal, rapped sections are, Sussman’s clean singing is a whole other echelon of bad; I’ve never heard somebody so tone deaf put out an album. “Creatures of Habit” is a spoken-word lullaby he seems to softly sing to himself, but it’s out of tune. Every phrase has the same lilt to the extent I get nauseous thinking about it. Several tracks of vocals are even layered atop one another to try and make the harmonic vocabulary richer, but that just exacerbates the out-of-tuneness. “Memento Mori Love Song” tries its best to be a Sleep Token track, a passionate love tune at the start turned “extreme metal” by the end, but again, Sussman’s crooning is an order of magnitude worse than Hozier’s… I mean Vessel’s. Maybe the chorus of the track would be passable if it weren’t so out of tune that it’s practically a different song altogether. 

The instrumentation is as varied as the vocal performance on Songs for Coming Forth by Day, with little more success. The worst offender is the synth Skrik employs as the melody-bearer across much of the album: As if the bad nu metal wasn’t enough, “Machina” and “The Scream” are almost chiptune-ified. When Skrik flips the switch from nu metal and pop to “extreme metal,” it’s usually some variation of industrial metal with programmed blast beats and a flaccid guitar tone. Sadly, those metal parts are the closest-to-serviceable parts of Songs for Coming Forth by Day because they are only your regular, everyday lame and not this-is-one-of-the-most-uniquely-terrible-blends-of-sounds-I’ve-ever-heard terrible. 

And yet, Skrik’s craziest choices are all on the thirteen-minute beast of a closer, “Mana from Libido,” in which a ukulele takes over the choruses—Skrik also makes poor attempts at proggy polyrhythms and psychedelic droning sections. There are also samples from Blue’s Clues and Wreck-It Ralph. The song is such a catastrophic dumpster fire that I honestly have to stand back and look at it with awe; how does somebody think to include such an eclectic variety of weird influences and combine them so poorly? My only theory is divine inspiration. Sussman’s execution was abysmal, even if he had a lot of big ideas and seemingly tried his best to have them come to fruition.

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Recommended tracks: Snakes, Toad in the Mud
You may also like: Gonemage, Enopolis, Ghost City Limits, Doodseskader
Final verdict: 2/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: independent

Skrik is:
– Brandon Sussman (everything)