If you’ve ever been snowed in during winter or maybe had to quarantine for COVID or otherwise found yourself trapped indoors for a long period of time, you know that those stretches of time can lead to something new, maybe something creative, maybe something destructive. For one of my favorite post-hardcore bands, Birds In Row, creation and destruction happened simultaneously last winter when they teamed up with the techno/industrial duo Maelstrom & Louisahhh and locked in during a spell of harsh weather. The result was a song titled “Violent God”, an intense, dark track that blends each artists’ respective talents into a seamless fusion of post-punk guitars, gritty industrial, and Lousiahhh‘s own harsh vocals. ‘Do I believe in a violent god?/you make me believe,‘ she declares in the song’s refrain. As the tension builds the guitars and electronics seem to amplify and compliment each other into something caustically complimentary, vicious and volatile yet sophisticated in its composition. The logical conclusion was to spend the next 16 days writing and recording an album, also titled Violent God, and the new collaboration/group called themselves Pain Magazine.
Across11 tracks, Pain Magazine flex a multitude of influences and sounds that tickle my inner goth. After the opening title track, Birds In Row take over vocal duties on “Weak And Predatory”, driven by grating industrial bass and a wash of guitars and synths that echo the anxious and angry lyrics. These two tracks would drive any goth nightclub into a head-pounding frenzy, but the post-punk follower “Dead Meat” manages to speed things up while even more smoothly blending the seemingly disparate sounds of Pain Magazine‘s parentage into a fully realized progeny, but their trickery is far from over. From the punked-up rager “Magic” to the haunted dub of “Like A Storm” to “Horse Song”‘s lush vocal melodies that call to mind Low, Violent God is a grim kaleidoscope of sounds, each track a new beast to wrestle with.
Pain Magazine sound like they are experimenting, and to be fair, they are. Despite this, Violent God feels cohesive and masterfully sequenced, as if this new group has been working together for years and knows exactly what the audience wants out of an album. They could have easily settled on a singular tone or approach, but this quintet has pulled from their collective experience and crafted an album that I cannot stop listening to. Little details in the instrumentation continue to reveal themselves to me. “A Good Hunter” features what feels like chopped samples of intricate guitar over a dusty beat that recalls the exhilaration of hearing Radiohead‘s Kid A for the first time, layered and complex with Louisahhh‘s yearning lyrics to keep the complexity grounded.
“A Good Hunter” joins “Nice Guy” and “Horse Song” with lyrical themes of strained relationships, feeling desperate for love, lust, and satisfaction. One can picture late nights in a rain-slicked city where under glowing streetlights lovers wrestle with their own ids and egos trying to find the right balance. Other songs stand out as more political in nature. “Weak And Predatory” is the exact description I would use for the increasingly global scourge of capitalistic autocrats and oligarchs, sucking up wealth and resources from the very workers who generate it. ‘There goes my rent, rake all my money, my time, my freedom of speech, my self esteem/gone,’ Birds in Row sing. “Choke Points” sees Louisahhh breaking down the music industry, describing the compromised integrity of algorithm-based streaming, creating art for fractions of a penny and having to pander to industry approved sounds and looks to get a leg up.
Pain Magazine gives us a lot to unpack and process on Violent God, both musically and lyrically. There haven’t been many goth-adjacent albums this year that have caught my adoration quite like this one in 2025. As we enter October, the ultimate month for us children of the night, Pain Magazine have given us one of the best soundtracks for spooky season. Though bats and ghosts and rampaging serial killers aren’t what drives the horrors, instead it is the horrors of living in a world driven by lust and greed and how we handle those things within ourselves. Violent God is nothing short of outstanding, and I sincerely hope Pain Magazine isn’t a one-off project, because they have unleashed a highly addictive sound that speaks truth to power and to the darkest parts of our individual psyches.
