Neurosis — An Undying Love for a Burning World review by Mark J. "Devastating in precisely the ways that the best Neurosis records have always been"

 -WE ARE TORN WIDE OPEN-

Neurosis — An Undying Love for a Burning World review by Mark J. "Devastating in precisely the ways that the best Neurosis records have always been"

Neurosis — An Undying Love for a Burning World (Neurot Recordings, 2026)

Nobody asked us. That's the point. No trailer, no press cycle, no carefully managed rollout with a "lead single" designed for algorithmic ingestion. Just the record, dropped onto an unassuming Thursday like a piece of granite through a plate-glass window. March 20, 2026. The first Neurosis album in a decade, live on every streaming platform before most people had finished their first coffee. If you needed any proof that this band still operates on its own terms and nobody else's, the delivery alone said everything.

That it exists at all is extraordinary. Not just because of the silence — though ten years is a long time, even by Neurosis standards — but because of what that silence contained. In 2019, Scott Kelly was expelled from the band he co-founded after admitting to systematic abuse of his family. The remaining members issued a statement of support for the victims, included crisis lines, and went quiet. No dramatic declarations about the future. No farewell tour. No closure. Just the door closing. And for years, those of us who'd grown up inside this music had to sit with the possibility that we'd heard the last of it. That Fires Within Fires — fine, measured, strangely muted — was the accidental epitaph.

It wasn't.

An Undying Love for a Burning World is Neurosis's twelfth record and their most nakedly essential since A Sun That Never Sets. It is, against all logic, the sound of a band with something left to say — and the fury to say it.

Let's deal with the lineup question first, because it's the thing every review has to navigate and most will handle clumsily. Aaron Turner. If you know your history, this isn't a surprise so much as an inevitability that took twenty-five years to crystallise. ISIS were not influenced by Neurosis the way thousands of other bands were influenced by Neurosis — they were shaped by them at the molecular level, built from the same insistence that volume was a spiritual tool and that patience was a form of violence. Turner has said that Enemy of the Sun hit him like a physical event when he first heard it. That's not a music journalist talking. That's someone whose actual nervous system was rewired. And the intervening years — Old Man Gloom, the dissolution of ISIS, and then SUMAC, one of the most uncompromising heavy bands of the last decade — haven't softened him. They've stripped him back. His voice on recent SUMAC records carries a rawness that's almost uncomfortable to sit with. Exactly what this band needed.

The production call is worth noting, too. Through Silver in Blood in 1996, was the last Neurosis record not run through Steve Albini's hands. Every major record since — Times of Grace, A Sun That Never Sets, Given to the Rising, everything — bore Albini's fingerprints, that confrontational, unadorned physicality that made Neurosis sound like they were recorded in a condemned building at the end of the world. Albini died in 2024. The door that closed there was not a small one. For this record, Neurosis worked with Scott Evans, who has engineered Kowloon Walled City, Great Falls and — critically — SUMAC. The thread holds. Evans works with the same philosophy: capture the room, capture the moment, don't perform surgery on it afterwards. An Undying Love for a Burning World sounds enormous in the way that things that are actually enormous sound. Not manufactured enormousness. The real thing.

They recorded it across three weekends at Studio Litho in Seattle in the winter of 2025. That compression of time matters. This isn't a record that was laboured into being over years of second-guessing. It has the fever-pitch directness of people who needed to do this, who couldn't do this, and who came in knowing exactly why they were there.

The opening track, We Are Torn Wide Open, establishes the terms of engagement immediately. Von Till's voice comes in over a pulse that sounds like something being dragged across the floor of the ocean, and then Turner arrives alongside it — not as a counterpoint but as an amplification, a second source of the same frequency. Where Kelly and Von Till functioned as a kind of split consciousness, two voices from the same fractured self, Turner and Von Till operate differently. There's friction here, productive friction, two distinct personalities pressing against each other, and the result is a tension that runs through the whole record like a live wire.

Mirror Deep and First Red Rays do what the best mid-period Neurosis tracks always did: they build. Not in the obvious loud-quiet-loud architecture that every post-metal band now deploys on autopilot, but in the way that weather builds — slowly, patiently, until you're standing in the middle of something you didn't see coming and there's no way out but through. Blind is where Turner's contribution becomes undeniable on its own terms. Von Till strains over the hypnotic pulse while Turner's guitar warps and bends underneath it; they double-track the vocals in a way that creates a new kind of layering, not the Janus-faced duality of the Kelly years but something more like two people standing at the edge of the same abyss and refusing to look away.

Seething and Scattered carries a riff with genuine groove in it — you can trace the direct line from here to Remission-era Mastodon, which is only fair given how much Mastodon owe this band's early work. But Neurosis have never stayed in one place long enough for you to get comfortable, and the album's back half makes good on that. And then Untethered arrives, and the record does something genuinely unexpected. Where Seething and Scattered opens the door to groove, Untethered walks all the way through it — a rolling, almost hypnotic heaviness that carries a classic rock DNA so deep in its bones it takes a moment to locate. This is Neurosis with Blackmore's ghost in the room. Not pastiche, not homage — more like the band reaching back past their own formative touchstones to something older and finding that it still burns clean. The organ swell, the way the riff breathes and turns back on itself, the locked-in momentum of it — there's a mesmerising, almost ceremonial quality here that sits slightly outside the rest of the record in the best possible way. It's the eye of the storm. It earns its place not by matching what surrounds it but by contrasting it so perfectly that when In the Waiting Hours finally descends, the shift lands like a door sealing shut. Without Untethered as that fulcrum point, the back half wouldn't hit half as hard. It's the track that shouldn't work on paper and absolutely destroys in practice — which has always been one of Neurosis' most quietly devastating gifts. 

The final two tracks — In the Waiting Hours and Last Light — together run past twenty-eight minutes. This is where the record earns its title. The tribal drumming that Roeder has always provided at the record's close (and it's worth pausing here: Roeder had spoken publicly in 2025 about retiring from music, and yet here he is, and thank god) sounds less like percussion and more like a heartbeat that refuses to stop. Last Light builds to something that is simultaneously an ending and a refusal to end. The emotionally charged close is not a resolution. It's a statement of ongoing intent.

Thematically, this is Neurosis in 2026 doing what Neurosis has always done — using the personal as a lens for the catastrophic and using the catastrophic as a mirror for the personal. The press materials mention climate crisis, the sixth mass extinction, isolation, the "existential confusion and sorrow" of navigating a planet that has lost the plot. That could read as boilerplate if the music didn't mean it so absolutely. But Neurosis have never been able to fake anything. The album's title itself contains the whole contradiction they've spent forty years sitting inside: undying love for a thing that is burning. You don't turn away from it. You don't fix it. You witness it, you carry it, and you keep showing up.

Across its eight tracks, An Undying Love for a Burning World moves through the slamming grind of the band's earliest confrontational work and into the atmospheric weight of Times of Grace and the smouldering aftermath quality of A Sun That Never Sets — not sequentially, but simultaneously, as if the whole history of the band is now available to them in a single room and they can reach for any of it at any moment. That is what four decades of a singular artistic vision sounds like when it isn't spent. It sounds like this.

There will be people who reach for the caveat — that this can't be the real thing without Kelly, that the lineup change disqualifies something essential, that the band that made Through Silver in Blood no longer exists. Those people aren't wrong, exactly. That band doesn't exist. But what they're missing is that this band — Von Till, Edwardson, Roeder, Landis, and now Turner — has made a record that nobody, including them, had the right to expect. And it is devastating in precisely the ways that the best Neurosis records have always been devastating: not through aggression alone, not through atmosphere alone, but through the terrible weight of things that are actually true.

Nobody asked us. And yet here it is. The year is 2026, the world is on fire, and Neurosis just handed us the most important album of the year without so much as a press release to soften the impact. Some things are unkillable. Some things just refuse.

★★★★★

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An Undying Love for a Burning World is out now via Neurot Recordings on all digital platforms. Physical preorders available through Neurot's merch table (US) and Evil Greed (EU). Neurosis headline Fire in the Mountains festival, Blackfeet Nation, Montana, July 2026.