AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NOMADIC RITUALS — “FUST”

Mar 102025

(written by Islander)

It often happens that we, like everyone else, find our first exposure to an album in a single song provided in advance of the album release, even when we later find ourselves premiering the entire record. That is what happened here in the case of Fust, the apocalyptic fourth album by the sludge/doom band Nomadic Rituals from Northern Ireland that will soon be released by our friends at Cursed Monk Records.

One of their early singles from the album was “Change“. It greeted our ears with clobbering beats and demonic snarls, with vicious sizzling tones and shrill demented decibels. The song’s mangling low-frequencies lurch like some enormous primeval beast; the vocals scream and bay at the moon; the beats crack and tumble.

The music also pounds like a sledgehammer and seems to moan in agony, and the beasts come out in the doubled vocals too. It might have ended there, but doesn’t: the drums vividly clatter; the guitars go off like sirens; the low end brutally gouges with gruesome claws; the voices scream bloody murder.

As a welcome sign placed before listeners, “Change” was very fucking intense, an experience in rage and ruin, like a welcome sign made of skull and crossbones. How indicative was it of the album as a whole? You’re about to find out.

photo by Graeme Wilson

“Fust is a 6 track album that points the finger directly at the human race, highlighting its flaws and attitudes toward catastrophe and corruption.” That’s how Cursed Monk previews what’s coming, and the music itself might make you guess at something like that inspiration. The magnitude of the disgust, the bleakness, and the fury in the music is far greater than something provoked by a late bus or a water leak in the wall. It overflows in the album beyond that song “Change“.

Nomadic Rituals usually anchor these songs with the same kind of viciously corrosive and massively mangling riffage revealed in “Change“, and drive them with similarly skull-cracking beats and blows. There’s also no moderation in the extremity of the vocals. Those shattering screams (which any black metal band would be happy to have), abyssal gravel-toned bellows, and vicious snarls continually shiver a listener’s spine.

The music often sounds primitive — visions of shaggy, lumbering beasts from ancestral nightmares often spring to mind (as do visions of the UK band Conan). Those slowly heaving and stomping movements also happen to provoke primal reflexive responses when you hear them, going beyond mere headbanging and causing the whole body to want to pivot and pump.

Wisely, however, Nomadic Rituals don’t stay in the slow and stomping lane all the time. You find that out in the album’s very first song, “Nothing Left to Call Home“, when the music suddenly erupts in a violent convulsion of maniacally writhing riffage, thundering bass notes, rumbling tom-drums, and gunshot snare-strikes. Then the band throw the listener back and forth, slowing and accelerating with abandon while the vocals continue going mad.

Even in the slow lane, the music throughout the album brings in more than cold, beastly, fuzz-bombed brutishness and brazenly unhinged vocals (which are actually intelligible despite how caustic they are). It’s laced with fretwork-sounds of whining misery, moaning despair, and even frightening mystery, along with poisonous doses of wrenching feedback, weirdly swirling and sizzling electronics, and even a couple bits of frighteningly distorted spoken words in “Fault In The Process” and “The Rot“.

Speaking of “Fault In The Process“, it also includes tribal beats with bunker-busting force, bass lines that sound like something chewing through concrete, and a guitar motif that resembles a warped and dismal siren going off after everything has already been laid to waste.

And speaking of wastelands, the strangely twanging and slithering notes in “Beneath Black Skies” (which might be the album’s most diverse and discombobulating song) conjure visions of something hellish emerging from the desert after a nuclear event. Those aren’t the only surreal and twisted aspects of that song, which gets even more hallucinatory after the band start depressing the accelerator with increasing weight. (The bass throb in that song will loosen your bowels too).

Although Fust sounds more nightmarishly experimental in its two closing numbers, in the main the album is a physical and emotional demolition job, ruthless and ruinous, raging and destructively cathartic. It reveals a black vision of human affairs, and these days that seems pretty clear-eyed, doesn’t it?