Monolord - 2021 - I'm Staying Home

Relapse Records – none

 “I’m staying home” became one of the defining sentences of 2020, repeated as instruction, reassurance, resignation and fear. Monolord turn it into something much heavier than public-health etiquette. Thomas Jäger’s narrator is not comfortably sheltering from danger but rotting inside a tomb, surrounded by broken bodies, unanswered prayers and institutions that offer authority without rescue. The chorus briefly reaches toward daylight, yet home remains both protection and confinement. That doubleness fits doom perfectly. Safety has weight, isolation has walls and the place keeping death outside may begin to resemble a grave from within.

The song itself was left over from the sessions for 2019’s No Comfort, but Jäger rewrote and re-recorded the vocals to suit the new reality. Nothing about the music feels opportunistically attached to the pandemic. Monolord’s enormous low end, patient drumming and slowly bending guitar were already designed to make enclosure physical. Mika Häkki’s bass and Esben Willems’ drums establish a floor that feels several feet thick, while Jäger’s guitar spreads above it in dense waves. His clean, mournful voice provides the human scale inside that mass. The band’s power comes from contrast: the instruments sound capable of crushing a room, but the singer sounds like somebody still trapped inside it.
Monolord are masters of letting one riff reveal several emotional conditions. The central figure first feels punishing, then hypnotic and eventually almost consoling. Repetition does not stop time so much as give the listener somewhere stable to stand while the lyrics describe religious failure, absent fathers and private collapse. Willems’ mix and mastering keep the recording huge without turning it into one shapeless cloud. The bass remains distinct beneath the guitar, the drums move air and the vocal survives without being artificially lifted above the band. This is doom as architecture, every frequency helping construct the enclosure.
The second side changes the meaning of isolation by returning to a crowd. “The Bastard Son,” recorded live at Freak Valley Festival in 2019, begins with audience noise and expands into nearly ten minutes of public volume. Its placement is quietly powerful: the new song belongs to closed doors and interrupted plans, while the live recording preserves the communal world that had suddenly become inaccessible. The performance is rougher and more spacious than the studio title track, with amplifiers, stage and open air enlarging the trio’s sound. The crowd is not merely background evidence. It represents physical togetherness, the missing ingredient around which the 2021 release was built.
That contrast makes this brief record feel complete rather than like one new track padded with a live B-side. The studio piece says stay home because danger is everywhere; the concert recording remembers why people eventually need to leave home again. One side turns solitude into crushing interior space, while the other preserves a room full of bodies receiving the same riff together. Monolord never romanticize either condition. Crowds can disappear, homes can become tombs and faith may fail to answer, but music remains capable of making isolation audible enough to be shared.