Revisiting Ahab – The Boats of the Glen Carrig (2015)
Here at Doomnation Radio, we are drawn to music that moves beyond sound. These are the type of sounds that pull in stories, paintings, films, and poems until music and words form one continuous experience. Metal often creates space for other worlds to take hold. In doom, that space widens. The drawn-out sound and unhurried flow make room for stories and images to rise slowly, layer by layer.
Germany’s Ahab have been building these bridges since their earliest days. The Call of the Wretched Sea (2006) was steeped in Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), its riffs carrying the restless energy of that doomed chase. The Divinity of Oceans (2009) turned to the whaleship Essex, the real-life disaster of 1820 that shaped Melville’s vision as well. With The Boats of the Glen Carrig (2015), they turned toward the English author William Hope Hodgson’s 1907 novel, a quieter, stranger account of men adrift in hostile waters.
The cover art alone tells you this isn’t a straightforward journey. Designed by German artist Sebastian Jerke, it presents an unsettling underwater realm. A bloody red, hand-shaped creature with an eye-like mouth floats among tangled weeds and bioluminescent forms, surrounded by bizarre hybrids of crustaceans and mollusks. Its vibrant colors invite fascination, yet the organic strangeness is deeply unsettling. Jerke’s painting captures the very essence of Hodgson’s world – alive, alien, and impossible to fully understand, and sets the stage for music that hovers between beauty and horror.
Hodgson’s text reads like a ship’s log. The survivors, cast out after a wreck, drift through fog and weed-choked seas into places that seem alive in ways they cannot name. The ocean surrounds them with a suffocating calm one moment, then lashes out in sudden storms.
Ahab follow Hodgson’s narrative closely. Each track reflects a chapter or moment from the book, from The Isle to The Weedmen. Their lyrics pull directly from Hodgson’s language and imagery, keeping the sequence of events intact while expanding them into long, immersive passages. Clean guitars and soft vocals capture the fragile calm the sailors cling to. When distortion and growled vocals enter, the sound pulls the listener into deeper waters where the unknown lurks.
On The Isle, the music reflects the early moment in Hodgson’s novel when the castaways believe they’ve sighted land at last:
“Now we had been five days in the boats, and in all this time made no discovering of land. Then upon the morning of the sixth day came there a cry… that there was something which might be land afar upon our larboard bow; but it was very low lying, and none could tell whether it was land or but a morning cloud.”
Ahab set this scene with a calm, almost meditative opening. Yet the uncertainty in Hodgson’s words creeps into the sound as subtle tension, suggesting that what lies ahead may not bring safety.
Later, in The Weedmen, Hodgson describes strange creatures rising from the water:
“Now it is scarcely possible to convey the extraordinary disgust… there came into view, not a fathom below my feet, a face like to the face which had peered up into my own… the great eyes… the slug‑like undulating of its white and slimy body…”
This scene bleeds into the track’s crushing riffs, while guttural growls evoke creatures half plant, half flesh.
When the castaways hear cries in the marsh, the emotional heartbeat of the text – Hodgson writes:
“And so awesome was the thing that no man of us spoke; for it seemed that we harked to the weeping of lost souls.”
The main album’s narrative seems to come to its end with To Mourn Job, a song of weary acceptance that mirrors the novel’s ending. But there is another track, a special one that stands slightly apart from the rest: The Light in the Weed (Mary Madison).
While Mistress Mary Madison appears in Hodgson’s text as the nineteen-year-old niece of the captain’s wife and a symbol of fragile hope, Ahab took her name and carried it into a deeply personal place. As the band revealed in interviews, this song was inspired by a young woman who told them their music had been a lifeline during her chemotherapy treatments. That encounter shaped the track’s tone and purpose.
Here, Ahab leave behind the heavy weight of funeral doom and step into almost folk-like territory. Gentle guitar passages and layered melodies suggest a faint glow in the darkness, a flicker of light in the suffocating weeds. It feels like a breath taken after the album’s long descent, a brief moment where life persists even in hostile waters.
This approach places Ahab within a tradition of metal bands engaging directly with poetry and literature. Iron Maiden turned Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner into a galloping heavy metal epic. Summoning built their entire discography around Tolkien’s texts, crafting blackened hymns from Middle-earth. Here, Ahab’s work feels a bit different. Their music remains anchored to Hodgson’s narrative, but they slow it down until sound and story seem to grow from the same deep waters.
Compared to The Call of the Wretched Sea, which was monolithic and crushing, The Boats of the Glen Carrig introduces more space and restraint. The Divinity of Oceans began exploring dynamics, but here the shifts between calm and intensity feel tethered directly to Hodgson’s narrative rhythm. Looking ahead to The Coral Tombs (2023), Glen Carrig now feels like a transitional album: it holds the oceanic weight of their early works while pointing toward the broader textures and experimental spirit of their later music.
This “story-to-sound” approach gives the album a natural flow from start to finish. Rather than feeling like separate tracks, the songs chart a single course through Hodgson’s strange world. Ahab made Hodgson’s journey audible, giving his ocean a voice without stripping it of its mystery.
These are the albums we return to. Works that refuse to stay within the confines of music alone. The Boats of the Glen Carrig remains faithful to Hodgson’s novel and carries his ocean forward into another medium, letting its silence and strangeness take on new form.
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