Meditations on Dying is a deep record that refuses to leave your mind, even after several listens. Mark J all hails the phenomenal album by Halo of Teeth that is Meditations on Dying.
HALO OF TEETH — Meditations on Dying
Forty-seven gargantuan minutes. Four breathtaking tracks. An exhilarating journey through the human experience of death and dying, from depression to acceptance. That's what Perth's Halo of Teeth have put out into the world, and it lands with the weight of something that was genuinely necessary to make.
Formed in 2022 on the unceded lands of the Wadjuk Noongar people, the band sits in the post-black metal space with avant-garde and experimental tendencies — openly anti-fascist, pro-LGBTQI+, visually and philosophically coherent in ways that most extreme metal bands never bother to be. Their debut arrives as a double gatefold LP with hand-painted artwork by Alex CF — the artist behind Fall of Efrafa, Lightbearer, Archivist — recorded and mixed by Ron Pollard at Sleepwalkers Dread and mastered by Colin Marston at The Thousand Caves in New York. These are not cosmetic choices. Marston's heart-stopping mastering fingerprint and Alex CF's insightful visual world are both embedded in an underground network that values idea and execution over visibility. This is a record that exists inside a lineage that understands death as a subject rather than an aesthetic.
The black metal here runs more Blut Aus Nord or Thantifaxath than anything remotely cartoonish — angular and devotional rather than blast-beat-as-spectacle — but Halo of Teeth work it into something more contemplative, more willing to sit still in the darkness rather than use it as a backdrop for aggression. The four colossus-like tracks unspool through shrewd structures that follow emotional logic rather than genre convention: passages of obliterating density suddenly opening into something sparse and grief-struck, then closing back down. The dying metaphor is neither macabre theatre nor nihilistic posture; it's treated with the kind of seriousness that Kübler-Ross brought to her clinical work, and the record is richer for it.
Meditations on Dying is a deep record that refuses to leave your mind, even after several listens. The expertise shines from various music community veterans, and this is a stunning album of sheer power.
This is the most significant Australian extreme metal debut of 2026. Full stop.
SUPPORT THE FUCK OUT OF THIS BAND AND ALL THEY DO. THIS IS A FALL TO THE FLOOR TYPE RECORD.
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