(written by Islander)
The Arizona atmospheric/depressive black metal band Suicide Forest began life in 2016 as the solo project of A. Kruger. Following a sequence of demos and a live recording, the band released its self-titled debut album in 2018 and a second album (Reluctantly) in 2021, as well as splits and an EP.
The third album, 2025’s IX of Swords, marked Suicide Forest’s studio debut as a more complete lineup. It included a revisiting of demo-era material as well as a new instrumental piece and a cover of Ceremonial Castings’ “Sweet Misery I Foresee”.
With their creatives fires still blazing, the band have now completed work on a fourth album. Titled World of Decay, it’s set for release on June 5th. The band tell us: “World of Decay is a bit of a new beginning for Suicide Forest as it is the first full-length recorded as a three-piece. Though still building on the sound and themes explored in the ‘solo era’ material.”
Today we’re bringing you the premiere of the album’s monumental opening song, a stunner called “Crushing Waves of Grief“.
The song is an unusually long one, but trust us when we say there’s no chance that listeners’ attentions will wander. It’s a multi-faceted experience, but one that’s relentlessly captivating — an emotional powerhouse that’s very hard to forget once heard.
In its opening phase, the song is downright breathtaking, indeed nearly overwhelming in its gloriously incendiary sweep and hard-driving, heart-pounding momentum. A tandem of riffing and synths floods the senses with high arcs of blazing sound that are vast in scale and indeed rise and fall like waves. Searing screams and brilliantly swirling stratospheric melodies drive the arcs of intensity even higher above furiously thundering drums.
The emotional power of the music is explosive, though it seems to channel intense distress as well as fierce yearning. But the music changes. A vividly rippling and reverberating guitar-bridge establishes an exhilarating and resilient melody that’s then carried forward as the rest of the band join in with other sounds that brightly whirl and with drumming that’s off to the races again — and that melody drives into a listener’s head just as powerfully as the opening phase. The vocals are still shattering in their tormented intensity — wailing, screaming, and snarling as if tomorrow will never come.
When the music changes again, lonely piano keys ring a plaintive melody, and once again the full band arrive to carry it forward in even more intensely stricken fashion. Once again, the music is so immersive as to be engulfing. The abrasive riffing feels like agony in the lower range, and feels like both grievous bereavement and fervent pleading in the shimmering, sparkling, and whirring tones that once more occupy the music’s stratospheric heights.
Suicide Forest demonstrate a serious talent for creating evocative melodies. The song really is intensely memorable in its rendering of desire and distress, resilience and despair, abandonment and fury, and it’s far more thrilling and affecting in different ways than you might imagine from the song’s title — though most of the time it does indeed hit with the power of a typhoon’s tides.
SUICIDE FOREST is:
A. Kruger – Guitar/Vocals/Synth
Z. Giguere – Bass
R. James – Drums
World of Decay was recorded in the winter of 2025 in the cabin at Half Moon Ranch in Dragoon, Arizona. It was produced by A. Kruger and mastered by Collin Jordan at The Boiler Room. The album’s cover art was created by Leanne C. Miller (@leannecmiller.artwork), and layout by @jdorge13.
The album is available for pre-order now on vinyl LP, CD, and digital formats. After the links below we’ve also included a stream of the album’s first single (the song which follows “Crushing Waves of Grief“), “When Only Death Can Bring You Peace“.
That first advance track is also ultra-long, and both slower and more immediately depressive in its atmosphere, though it’s also a tremendously immersive, multi-faceted, and very moving experience.
A piano and shimmering synths play prominent roles in its rendering of severe heartbreak and hopelessness, but it also includes a riveting guitar solo that sounds a bit like a saxophone’s sibling, and like the song we’ve just premiered it also expands into vast and daunting reaches before descending into a grieving and gripping finale accented by acoustic guitar.
PRE-ORDER:
https://suicideforestblackmetal.bandcamp.com/album/world-of-decay
FOLLOW SUICIDE FOREST:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/SuicideForestDSBM