Review: Ritual Mass – Cascading Misery (2025)
Ritual Mass emerge from Pittsburgh, USA, with their first full-length, Cascading Misery. It follows an early demo and the 2019 EP Abhorred in the Eyes of Eternity, works that hinted at the kind of suffocating death-doom they now stretch into a full record.
Cascading Misery begins in density. The guitars arrive thick and murky, closer to the drag of earth shifting under pressure than to anything sharpened or metallic. The vocals enter as if torn from the same ground, raw and guttural, with no distance between voice and listener. This immediacy runs through the record: everything feels near, almost too close, as though recorded in a room that cannot contain the volume inside it.
The opening track “Obsidian Mirror” defines the record’s movement with riffs that grind forward like heavy machinery left running in the dark. Its title already places the record in a realm of reflection where nothing is shown clearly, only distorted in blackened surfaces. “Immeasurable Hell” follows with violence compressed into four minutes, a torrent that frames torment as condition rather than event. “Looming Shapeless Entity” turns toward disorientation, guitars circling in figures that never quite reveal a full form, as if describing a presence too large to name.
The title track “Cascading Misery” distills the album’s intent into less than four minutes. Its central riff repeats with punishing persistence, embodying the suffocating quality named in the title. “Frozen Marrow” returns to the physical body, evoking a chill that reaches into bone, a reminder that mortality is not abstract but anchored in flesh. The closing piece “Disquiet” stretches past fourteen minutes, slowing the record into its deepest descent. Rather than seeking release, it allows the instruments to erode in time, leaving silence as the only resolution.
Production gives the album its real character. Greg Wilkinson ensures the instruments never blur into formless noise. Distortion here reveals the corrosion inside the sound itself. This quality separates Cascading Misery from countless underground death-doom records that confuse murk with atmosphere. Here, the murk has depth, and the decay has texture.
The bloodline behind Ritual Mass is clear. The dragging tempos and cavernous tones recall Incantation’s earliest days, where riffs seemed pulled from underground vaults rather than written in rehearsal rooms. The abrupt swings into faster motion echo Autopsy’s ability to pivot from crawling rot to frenzied attack without warning. There are also shades of Winter’s monumental Into Darkness, in the way repetition is used as endurance rather than ornament. Yet Ritual Mass avoid direct imitation. Instead, they draw from these traditions to carve something austere, as if stripping doom-death back to its barest foundations and then forcing those foundations to bear the full load.
Lyrically, the album moves through spiritual ruin and existential torment. The words speak of marrow and rot, of faith torn apart and the holy left in fragments. Anxiety, fear, and memory are not treated as passing states but as permanent conditions. “Immeasurable Hell” frames suffering as both physical and metaphysical, while “Frozen Marrow” ties mortality to the body itself. “Obsidian Mirror” and “Looming Shapeless Entity” both dwell on distorted perception and presence, suggesting forces beyond comprehension. The title track names misery as an environment one inhabits, and “Disquiet” stretches that condition into endurance. The language is direct, describing the stripping away of humanity until nothing remains but carcass and voice.
As a debut full-length, Cascading Misery sets a clear direction. Ritual Mass have an obvious commitment to intensity, to carrying one sound until it corrodes, to letting heaviness define duration. The result is an album that refuses embellishment, and settles into its own gravity. It leaves the impression of having been dragged through a landscape stripped bare, where nothing remains but rust, and the memory of noise.
*
