There’s a chiming malevolence to some of the guitar work on No Symmettry… Only Disillusion, the new album from New Yorkers False Gods that’ll have fans of the mighty Killing Joke throwing their hats in the air in delight.

Similarly the vocals of Mike Stack have more than a whiff of KJ leader Jazz Coleman about them, especially at the start of closing track An Eternity of Failure; however here guitarists Greg March and Nick Luisi opt for a more straight-up sludgy axe assault. The counterpoint of post punk and classic doom works better than many might expect (though not pour humble interlocutor – I’ve always been a sucker for this kinda stuff), although a full-albums worth of this sort of sonic battery may be too much for those of a more delicate disposition…

If that’s the case, you may like to kick off with leadoff single Stay Frosty, which lays off the bludgeon ever so slightly but does serve to show False Gods in their most complete light, weaving together those influences in extremely palatable style without ever really going off the deep end. A False Gods primer, if you will… After you’ve mastered that you’ll be ready for the less-forgiving-on-the-ears sturm und drang of Lords of Emptiness, wherein the band flex their sludge muscles menacingly but with similarly pleasing results to the trained ear.

As ever in 2020 there’s precious little in the way of new ground being broken here, but the fact remains that False Gods know their business and go about it keenly with the ready fists of seasoned beer-hall bruisers; Theirs is a world of precious little melody, sure, but if the sheer weight of riffage rearranging your internal organs is something you enjoy experiencing every now and then, well, you’ll have to go a long way to beat this release.

No Symmetry… Only Disillusion releases today (October 16th).