Monolord - 2019 - No Comfort

Relapse Records – RR7430

 No Comfort is an album about searching for shelter inside music that refuses to pretend shelter exists. Monolord’s low frequencies arrive with enormous physical weight, but heaviness is not used as a curtain hiding thin ideas. The riffs make dread tangible. Bass, guitar and drums move together like one slow industrial body while Thomas Jäger’s distant, melodic voice describes religious doubt, environmental collapse, social isolation and the struggle to preserve some human attachment inside a damaged world. The title is therefore less a promise of misery than an honest description of the conditions under which the music must operate. Comfort cannot be assumed, so the band tries to build something usable from pressure, repetition and shared volume.

“The Bastard Son” enters with the certainty of a myth already controlling the people beneath it. The main riff is colossal, but Monolord continually alters its surroundings through rhythmic displacement, guitar layering and sudden openings in the density. Jäger’s vocals seem to float several feet above the instruments, giving the song the peculiar perspective of somebody narrating a disaster while being carried through it. “The Last Leaf” narrows the focus from apocalyptic authority to the final surviving evidence of life. Its guitars remain thick enough to distort the air, yet the song’s melancholy becomes increasingly melodic, allowing beauty to emerge without weakening the impact. Monolord understands that sorrow and weight reinforce one another when neither is exaggerated for spectacle.

“Larvae” makes the album’s internal development most visible. Clean guitar creates a fragile entrance before the full band begins widening the floor beneath it, moving between psychedelic suspension, slow tectonic rhythm and a final riff that seems to arrive from below the recording. The lyrics turn religious certainty and technological obedience into different versions of the same false security, but the song does not replace one doctrine with another. Its comfort comes from admitting uncertainty while continuing to move. Mika Häkki’s bass is especially important here. It does not merely double the guitar or make the record sound larger; it behaves like another gravitational layer, changing the emotional force of each passage whenever it enters or withdraws.

“Skywards” initially offers release through motion. Esben Willems gives the central groove a muscular unevenness, allowing the song to push forward without settling into an ordinary march. Jäger’s higher vocal register and expanding guitar lines create the feeling of rising, but the band never fully escapes the weight beneath them. That tension keeps the freedom from becoming decorative optimism. “Alone Together” then strips away much of the armor. Acoustic texture, pulsing bass and a mournful vocal melody reveal how vulnerable Monolord’s songs remain before distortion enlarges them. The title would acquire an accidental new meaning after 2019, but within the album it already describes a deeper modern condition: people occupying the same ruined landscape while remaining emotionally unreachable to one another.

The eleven-minute title track gathers every part of the record into one final slow disaster. Restrained passages leave individual notes exposed before the amplifiers return with greater consequence, proving that Monolord’s power depends as much upon withheld force as constant saturation. The words widen from personal mourning toward burning skies, bleeding oceans and mountains reduced to gravel, yet the song’s final need is still directed toward another person. That movement is crucial. The scale may be planetary, but the emotional unit remains intimate. Faced with destruction too large for one life to comprehend, the voice reaches for one remaining connection rather than a heroic solution.

No Comfort was also a change in how Monolord constructed their sound. Jäger developed the songs at home, then Häkki and Willems reshaped them through their own bass and drum parts, while the band recorded outside its rehearsal-room system for the first time. The resulting clarity does not domesticate their heaviness. It allows the internal machinery to be heard: the bass moving independently beneath the guitar, the drums changing a riff’s balance, and multiple guitar voices opening pathways through the mass. The album remains crushing, but crushing is only its outer dimension. Inside the volume is a record about disbelief, grief and damaged hope, made by three musicians who understand that sometimes music cannot provide comfort. It can only tell the truth loudly enough that nobody has to endure it alone.