Irish sludge metal trio, Tooms, earned their stripes in precursor band, Gaia, which started in 2013 and then transitioned into their current incarnation in 2017. Cursed Monk Records issued their 2020 debut, The Orb Offers Massive Signals, and now the group retain the services of the latter for their vinyl pressing and have Road to Masochist Records on board to handle the CD production and distribution for album number two. Was it worth the six-year wait?
Seldom do you hear an album with an extended drum roll, but it introduces the low-end fuzz of the guitars in style here for opener, ‘Blood Rust: of Cudgel and Quill’. Listen how the latter throbs with a hyperactive pulse under the hand of the palm-mute. Alex Hölzinger sounds like somebody who woke up after a hundred years in a sepulchre. His guitar playing is just as gloomy, operating under a glut of distorted downstrokes and cackling arpeggiated shapes. The surprise here is how many parts the trio fit into five minutes. Drummer, Kieran Grace, is the main driver, switching tempos at will and following the guitar rhythms through black and death metal ventures in the faster sections.
The major chord distortion of ‘Lowlander’ is just as morbid. It only needs ten seconds to settle into a doom metal dirge with cutting mid-range intervals and reverse pitch bends plucked from the bottom string of the guitar. The bass notes of James Anto Donnellan vibrate as if muffled underneath layers of grime and cobwebs. It’s too busy to be boxed away as death-doom, yet too gory for sludge metal. The low shrill of the chords offers a useful contrast to the chugging rhythms at the heart of this song. At the opposite end of the spectrum, ‘Tower of Silence’ is the equivalent of playing hardcore with no arm room or space to lock in at a fast tempo. The weight of the guitars and bass operate like magnets sucking everything to the earth’s core. Only when the hands reach for the higher frets in mournful harmony, do the melodies pierce through like dim candlelight.
A glimpse of the lyrics might surprise you if you think the deadpan growls and screams will touch upon macabre subject matter. Is ‘Drinkvlt’ a repudiation of alcohol or a fatalist acceptance that it’ll always have control over us? “I’ve wasted so much of my time being wasted all of the time / Damp lung, wet head / Fast track to slow suicide,” roars Hölzinger. Chants of “Join the drink cult,” have no traces of contempt in them, and the despondent sludge metal tempo is just as poignant as the words. Yet this group have more than just misery and self-deprecating humour in their arsenal. The dusty open-road guitar musings of ‘Two Silver Pieces’ will transport you from Limerick to Nevada as if scoring the transition scenes of a Cormac McCarthy novel for the big screen.
Not everything is easy to absorb here, and nor should it be. There’s more despair in this record than your average metal outing. Nevertheless, sludge metal allows you to be Jimmy the disillusioned white collar grafter playing Jimmy Page riffs in Obituary’s overdrive settings. The psychotic edge and deliberate human imperfections are what makes it so relatable. Even with this in mind, the prospect of eight minutes of bloated doom metal in ‘Whitethorn’ should be enough to scare anybody into paralysis, but Tooms remember the other part of sludge metal – its roots in hardcore. Hölzinger uses his axe in chopping motion like technical doom legends, Confessor, for most of the action before launching into a succession of death metal passages. In case this didn’t get your adrenaline flowing, they end things with a hardcore breakdown for the two-stepping brigade.
You can find a groove in the closing effort, ‘Physics Beyond the Standard Model’, if you shove aside the guttural vocals and forget about the monstrous tunings that lead towards an inevitable limp of slow grinding power chords at the halfway point. At eleven minutes in length, you know it won’t end in this tone of hopelessness, and it doesn’t. Tooms ramp up the tempo for the second half and treat you to d-beats and tremolo rhythms before tossing you into the charnel house to die among the corpses. You might even want to experience this again after one listen. After all, there’s a reason why their record label is called Road to Masochist…
Kirk Houghton
Verdict
Release Date: 29/05/2026
Record Label: Road to Masochist
Standout tracks: Lowlander; Drinkvlt; Physics Beyond the Standard Model
Suggested Further Listening: Morag Tong – Grieve (2023), Cavern Deep – Part III – The Bodiless (2023), Ghost Bath – Rose Thorn Necklace (2025)