Style: Black Metal, Thrash Metal, Progressive Metal (Harsh Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Darkthrone, Absu, Celtic Frost
Country: USA (OR)
Release date: 02 October 2026

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Your body feels heavy as your eyes slowly begin to open. What is this place? You try craning your neck in search of a better understanding of your surroundings, but it’s stuck and stiff. In fact, you can’t seem to move at all. Your eyes dart back and forth, searching for any sign of familiarity, until out of the peripheral of your vision: movement. Is that… your arm? Yes, it’s slowly reaching across your torso, but you’re certainly not willing it to move. Helpless, you watch and wait as the appendage reaches across to the opposite side, grabbing just below its neighbors armpit. The fingers begin to twitch and claw, tightening their grip as they dig into muscle and sinew. You try to scream, but your mouth remains shut. Agonizing minutes pass feeling more like hours, and before long your body is host to a gaping pit. Suddenly, you begin bending forward, head tilted to the side, until your ear is perfectly lined up with the wound. For a tense few seconds all is silent, before faint echoes and reverberations begin to arise from within your own body. You strain your ears, trying to make sense of what you’re hearing, until suddenly…

Öugh!!!

Holy shit! Is that Spirit Possession’s Steve Peacock emanating from my self-inflicted spectral wound? I wonder if he’ll sign my kidney?

For those not yet initiated into the haunted cult, Spirit Possession plays a fevered mixture of black/thrash/prog metal rife with reverb, delay, and a plethora of frenzied hammer-ons and pull-offs. Guitarist/vocalist Steve Peacock has his dextrous fingers in many a quality musical pie—Ulthar, Pale Chalice, and Black Curse to name a few—but Spirit Possession is certainly the tastiest and most unique of the bunch. Joined by Ashley Spungin on drums and synthesizers, the duo continues down twin tongued pathways with their third LP, Cathedral Speech. By now, the Spirit Possession brand is well defined and rather refined, so expectations are higher than ever. Let’s just say, Steve better knock this one out of the park after the whole ‘gaping hole in the side’ incident.

“Cathedral Speech” wastes no time introducing Peacock’s signature style: frantic guitar trills mirror the chord progression laid out by Spungin’s synths—more ghastly choir in tone than keyboard—building through power chords and interval jumps before exploding into mean black-thrash riffs accompanied by stomping blasts and d-beats. Immediately, one may notice a relative smoothness of texture or lack of bite to Peacock’s tone thanks to another peculiarity of his style: finger-picking. That’s right, Peacock completely forgoes the almighty pick in Spirit Possession¹, his already busy performance feeling almost slippery as a result, especially when combined with all the trilling hammer-ons and pull-offs. Such a style can be initially hard to grasp (almost literally), which is where Spungin’s relatively straightforward drum performance comes in. Spungin plays with plenty of muscle, lending a tangible, anchoring physicality to Cathedral Speech. Frenetic blast beats and massive ‘tupa-tupa’ stomps are perpetually warring for attention, producing a ‘start-stop’ rhythmic style which is constantly catching the listeners attention, keeping them grounded moment to moment. 

Spungin can only do so much, though. Cathedral Speech seems hellbent on obfuscating the listeners grasp on reality as much as possible. Longform songwriting—averaging around seven minutes—continuously balances black metal meditations and intense, jagged thrash riffs which uncoil over minutes at a time, often being recontextualized to serve both genres. Maze-like song structures arise from such interplay, the ‘riff-first’ philosophy overshadowing each song’s structural intent. Near-constant lead guitar adds another layer to parse, and I’m sure at this point you can guess if they’re soaringly melodic or manically unhinged. Peacock’s vocals run through ceaseless delay and reverb, sounding less ‘utterance from a human being’ and more ‘spilling out through a malignant wound in the flesh of unreality’. A purposefully hazy production job courtesy of genre mainstay Colin Marston (un)ties everything together, blending tones and textures while retaining clarity enough for each performance to cut through. Every single decision made on Cathedral Speech threatens to completely unravel every other decision while simultaneously serving the album as a whole, leaving the listener fevered, disoriented, and completely addicted. 

Still, moments of beauty do pop their head up every now and again. Flashes of acoustic guitar are sprinkled throughout Cathedral Speech which serve both as melodic ornamentation (“Cathedral Speech”) and reflective interlude (“Backward Commandments”, “Hanged Angels as Patternwalls”). Such moments can be strikingly pretty, though the most disarming moment of beauty presents itself around three quarters of the way through “Second Liturgy (…Impossible Exits…)”, where remarkably wide open interval trilling outlines a gorgeous descending chord progression, a brief moment of clarity and respite in the midst of demented fever dream. Such elegant moments may sound out of place in music which can otherwise be described as “Darkthrone stomps combined with tech-thrash finger acrobatics suffocated by an avant-black atmosphere”, but at this point, I’d expect no less from Peacock and Spungin. Cathedral Speech is Spirit Possession’s crowning achievement thus far, distilling every oddity through a more-focused-than-ever sense of songcraft, and certainly a standout of 2026. I forgive you Steve, but I still expect you to foot my hospital bill.

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Recommended tracks: Cathedral Speech, Hanged Angels as Patternwalls, The Sharpening
You may also like: Ulthar, Negative Plane, Funereal Presence, Predatory Light, Scimitar
Final verdict: 9/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Instagram

Label: Profound Lore Records

Spirit Possession is:
– Steve Peacock (guitars, vocals)
– Ashley Spungin (drums, synthesizer)

1. It’s neat how he manages to still do all the “pick scrapes”. ↩︎