Fleshvessel throw the Hail Maryest Hail Mary of 2025, oozing heaps of decadent, bizarre progressive death metal on our concrete like colorful oil pools in city streets.
Release date: December 12, 2025 | I, Voidhanger Records | Facebook | Bandcamp
Dropping albums this good this late in the year has to be a very taxing affair as an artist, at least if you care at all to be recognized for the greatness you’ve put out into the world. The jury’s out on Fleshvessel – I know not what their true intentions or motivations are for making music – but it’s clear that one thing is unassailable and that’s the art speaks for itself and deserves to be recognized as such. Slight spoiler: because of the lateness of this release, we didn’t have time to properly evaluate and weigh it against our AOTY picks so it won’t be appearing on our list, but damn, after spending some time with it, I absolutely would have lobbied for Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded‘s inclusion.
From the first single I heard, “Mental Myiasis”, it was apparent that, despite the mid-December release date, I could not lose track of this album in the thick of a busy season. It was angular and twisty, not to mention overflowing with drama and the thrill of performance, wearing airy progressive interludes like silver tinsel (happy holidays indeed). The vocals are so varied – from Travis Ryan gutturals to Rob Halford falsettos, the emotional conveyance is top tier. There’s even a moment at the end of the first verse here where the lyrics simply say ‘*Horrible screeching*‘ and sure enough, that’s exactly what you hear. Of course I can’t forget to mention the pianos and synthesizers that sound like the coked-out melodic lines from Emerson, Lake & Palmer (not trying to imply anything other than a sonic vibe on behalf of Fleshvessel, unless I’m right in which, yeeeeeeeee, the ’70s are back, baby). It edges on incoherence at times, but that quality gives it an arresting feeling that I can’t help but feel pull at my shirt collar… and that’s just the fucking beginning.
“Mental Myiasis” is the first track of four on this 48-minute cerebral opera of stubbornness. That’s what obstinacy is after all, and as someone who’s a little obstinate myself, maybe that’s why I vibe with it so well. Fleshvessel are so keen on cramming square pegs into round holes throughout this album and where other bands would fail or come off too abrasive, pegs splintering their edges in order to enter said holes, this band’s artistic finesse, scale, and devotion more than adequately lube things up.
“Am” is insane – like, literally. It’s a blistering dedication to genocidal, sadist machine gods, namely AM who is often considered the original mad AI, from a big favorite of dark perverted dystopian sci-fi fans, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. While I’m not familiar with all the story beats of I Have No Mouth… “Am” the song feels like how I’d expect it would with some extra theatrical flair. There’s bare, rotted, rusted destitution in the core of the track to break up monolithic, seething screeds of torturous hate and incredible bouts of skittering melody provided by guitars and keys, like the humans in AM’s control fleeing his grasp in vain only to let out a shrill scream once cornered.
The track even goes as far as to hit us with spoken word monologues in character as AM, one being the infamous ‘HATE‘ speech that opens the I Have No Mouth… video game. It’s a particularly grim scenario to reflect on as AI companies burn the earth to attain a singularity that, who knows, could very well create a real AM or Skynet. I can hardly entertain these types of stories as fiction anymore and this song feels similarly sourced: from fear, highlighting the hubris and sin of man only to make a monument to failure. It’s very bleak, very beautiful.
“Cessation Fixation” is the shortest song at a bit under nine minutes, but is no less replete with mammoth sections of progression. Hyperfocused on death and dying, this track takes ‘I didn’t ask to be born’ to new depths of metastasized illness within, every atom in the body screaming for release like imprisoned rats, to break down into the ether from whence they came.
‘I could tie a cord around my neck and leap for all to see
I could drown in flames upon the steps of any embassy
Crawl into the seething emptiness that haunts my every step
Join my only sisters, martyrs of the stately cults of death‘
With viola and synth solos, every sound battles for attention, clawing at your shoes and pant legs like fetid, famished zombies as you stand on the shaky foundation of a dented car roof. The guitar motif that rears its bony head throughout this track a few times is my favorite on all of Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded.
Finally, “It Lurched From A Chasm In the Sky” blows the backdoors off the album with a 16-and-a-half-minute closer. It’s an apocalyptic, beastly end, a cosmic omen the scale of which it seems a hundred Godzillas couldn’t calm. I love how its arrival is poetically described – ‘Not air nor water, earth nor fire/Nor strings in tune upon the lyre/Could touch or reconcile or hold/What from the god-beast would unfold‘. Daf, flute, viola, synths, and drums all match in cataclysmic peril, but somehow, someway always stay on the rails as it relays the most destruction of any song yet, but it’s not extinction so much as a reckoning that contorts into an awakening of a new era. This is a great time to mention beyond my little lyric quotes that the storytelling on Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded is absolutely ridiculous in the most captivating manner, and the delivery by vocalist Troll Hart makes for one of my favorite performances of the year, her voice seamlessly metamorphosizing to the mood like the best Shakespearian dramatists you could find on earth.
Goddamn, this album is amazing. So delightfully weird, its inward focus on the shattered human condition is one paradoxically carrying a soul of levity and wit via the spectacle it commands, but also a heart of strength bolstered by sundering instrumentation and the utmost power of passion. You don’t just make an album like Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded, it channels through you. Some credit a divine or spiritual gift for the kinds of things we make like this, or perhaps hard-won and practiced expertise developed over years and years, others a savant-like skill innate in the most unlikely of people, as unexplainable as the art produced by their hands. Centuries ago, you’d be burned alive as a witch for rolling like this – hell, you still might the way things are going, and anyone wielding that kind of power is someone I want in my corner.
Fleshvessel, a new band for me, has quite convincingly entered my pantheon of must-listens in the future. Having skimmed their first LP, Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed, out of sheer impression this new album made on me, I can confidently say this is a marked improvement over it, and in only two years’ time! Holy shit! This is S-tier menacing and strange progressive metal, the likes of which we’ve heard from a lot this year, and yet this just about tops it all. Bra-fucking-vo.
