Blindfolded and Led to the Woods continue to whittle their sound down from its derivative deathcore origins like a prison shiv and it’s now ready to go for some arterial strikes to put us down for good with their best work yet
Release date: October 10, 2025 | Prosthetic Records | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp
Reflecting on The Hardest Thing About Being God Is That No One Believes Me in order to write about it makes me feel like I just got set loose after being kidnapped – bag over head, thrown in van, the whole ordeal. I know their name is Blindfolded and Led to the Woods, but our adversary today is a bit more of a trend-bucker, violent and unpredictable enough to scare, but not so sadistic to leave you broken and trembling. What it does have is enough obsession to set the eyes ablaze. The New Zealand quintet get pretty sick with it on this new project, their first conceptual story, and in the process make one of the best metal albums I’ve heard this year.
It’s a very meta setup the band have given us. This is the first album they’ve self-produced, themselves arguably obsessing over the minute and gargantuan details, tweaking and fixating, patching and building until a whole is presented. Their technicality and prowess assuredly make this much more of an endeavor than it would for most bands. Conceptually, The Hardest Thing About Being God is a story about a person’s gradual slip into madness and unhinged, unsafe behavior like stalking – passionate obsession that gives way to raging self-destruction. Where most bands would be keen on showing this in a more visceral and unsubtle manner, Blindfolded and Led to the Woods use some finesse, atmosphere, and nuance to elevate it… that doesn’t mean it’s bloodless though.
Really, it’s hard to think of any better avenue than progressive, technical metal for something like this. The weight, intensity, and speed are all great at expressing the darker emotions wrenching out of us in different ways with questionable legality. The angularity, diversity, and chaos propel it all in compelling, exacting ways so as to at least emulate a concord of ideas on a cerebral level. In other words, it’s frenetic and fancy. “Arrows of Golden Light” is one of the greatest examples of that and it’s the first damn song, packed with ferocity and shifting writing that really twists in the mind like a fleshy Rubik’s Cube. It’s unsettling and scene-setting – probably the heaviest song ever about meeting someone in a cafe. “Red” impresses melodically too, focusing on dense riffing that flits high and low (the benefit of having two guitarists I suppose).
Earlier this week, I said, boldly, in the EIN group chat that Stace Fifield is one of the best vocalists in metal right now and days later, I double down on that claim here because no one is going to stop me. I don’t say that out of arrogance, but of correctness. Dude is fucking beastly with it, you can practically hear each and every vein churn blood in his head when he screams, so much so that it makes you wish there was a word for something more intense than a scream. It’s supremely used in a concept like this where conveying the frayed sanity of the stalker character is paramount to the emotional weight. “Compulsion” and “600 Milligrams” are especially memorable hits, the former on metallic strength alone and the latter pedestaled neatly by eerie synth atmosphere before Fifield’s gallows-bound bellow liquifies your brain. If you suspend your disbelief for singers and think of them like actors who embody a character or idea rather than just singing/screaming poetry at you, Fifield is tops.
The only unabashedly pretty moment (aside from a progressive instrumental break in the middle of the title track) we get on the album is the closer “Coalescence” which features Hera Hjartardóttir with a silky, melodic vocal line that sounds like an angelic, perhaps bittersweet end to a story of terror. Sonically, it’s also more open and pensive than any other song on the album, wearing as much of its heart on its sleeve as makes sense and still doesn’t betray the core philosophy of Blindfolded and Led to the Woods. It’s moments like this that make me think of some of the similar and best stuff that Black Crown Initiate put together at their peak – if you know, you know – but more so it shows the lengths at which this band will and can go in order to realize their vision.
To be real for a moment, this album hits home more than I’d like it to. While it was absolutely nowhere to the extent that’s shown in this album, I too had bouts of near obsession with people brought on by attraction, desire, and (un)requited love far in my past. It’s not pretty or romantic, it’s very shameful and dissolves your reason and decency if you let it – in hindsight, it’s like watching yourself devolve. I think what Blindfolded and Led to the Woods did so well here, even if it was highly sensationalized and exaggerated for entertainment’s sake, was capture a character that you should feel disgusted by and have little to no remorse for, just as I do my former self who now knows better and wants others to learn from my mistakes. While I can’t parse out the whole story without all lyrics – including its promised twist near the end – it’s clear through performance alone that The Hardest Thing About Being God is all at once a cautionary tale, demonization of the very real mindset that makes this type of person possible, and another incredible notch on this band’s collective belt as they evolve into something I think even their younger selves could not see coming.
As it stands, this album and Rejecting Oblivion are just about neck and neck in quality and manic power, arm wrestling each other in a dimly-lit room sat upon rotting wooden chairs with pocket pistols aimed at the opposite’s pelvis under the table just waiting for the other to make a foul move. Differences abound though – one is defiant almost to a fault, the other is a wild-eyed representation of the worst qualities we stuff down in our emotional basements, under the childhood trauma, under the seed of narcissism and megalomania, under our collapsed dreams and desires, made so to clear space for managing our regimented lives that either drive us mad or comatose from boredom. The Hardest Thing About Being God Is That No One Believes Me is a blood orgy of multiple personalities, each one worse than the last, getting a turn at the controls of its central character to exact demented horror against others, so if it really wanted to break the fourth wall as it were and assassinate its predecessor, it could.
Band photo by Hudson Visuals
