Guillermo CastroAt the risk of romanticizing the past, there was a time when I was able to listen to music with fierce intent. No secondary tasks to perform, no life-work struggles to trigger my anxiety, no aimless doomscrolling to distract or mollify me with short-form brain rot. Just me and a record engaged in a kind of sacred ritual. An active, deliberate, solitary act aided by good headphones and maybe a lyric sheet to scan and ponder.
This is not to say that I no longer listen intently. To be sure, there are still moments when I find myself capable of shutting out the world and surrendering to an album or artist. But more and more those moments seem to land by happenstance. What once seemed to be psychically embedded as a core part of my nature now appears to rely on some strange confluence of timing, mood, and opportunity.
However, after spending considerable time with Vessel, the towering new record from post-metal behemoths IRREVERSIBLE, I’m inclined to reconsider that position. Split into two distinct movements, each spanning 20 minutes, the album is a dense, sprawling work full of myriad details that demand close inspection. It’s a record that lifts you up and pummels you down, almost daring you to trust your own center of gravity. The world—violent, chaotic, and terrifying as it can often be—does everything in its power to knock you off balance and leave you unmoored. Perhaps what I needed was a heavy anchor and sturdier rope to tether me in place.
By “heavy” and “sturdier” I’m not necessarily referring to massive riffs and burly grooves, although Vessel offers plenty on both fronts. There’s just something about the scale of the songwriting and the breadth of its collective vision that provides this record with its own weighty gravitas. Given the caustic nature of the music, especially the grueling A-side “Esus,” you’d think some of that hefty grandeur would be lost in the music’s strident wash. But IRREVERSIBLE have always maintained a knack for laying out their concepts and themes in so many breadcrumb trails, luring the listener with well-placed samples and found sounds that expand and intensify their sonic storytelling.
Remarkably, Vessel is the band’s first offering since they parted ways over a decade ago. Although the group never truly imploded, there was enough conflict to prompt a separation. Members eventually found themselves stretched across both coasts. Fortunately, IRREVERSIBLE’s core trio—guitarist/vocalist Jacob Franklin, drummer Zach Richards, and keyboard/vocalist Billy Henis—were able to work out their differences and reconcile. In 2022, Illinois-based Dipterid Records offered to release the group’s first LP SINS on vinyl, which proved to be a catalyst for the reunion. A year later, an opportunity to open for industrial metal titans Godflesh removed whatever doubts remained. IRREVERSIBLE was reborn.
Written in part while the band was still in dissolution, Vessel is the first record that wasn’t composed collaboratively with all the members in the same room. Yet it remains very much a cooperative, synergetic effort. Once a decision was made to work on new music, Franklin presented his bandmates with a handful of riffs that would go to form the bones of the album. Together, the trio sorted them between the two movements, allowing Richards to start tracking his own demos and give further shape to the album’s rapidly expanding contours.
It was at this point that Richards suggested bringing on a few close friends and former collaborators to help flesh out the music. For “Esus” they turned to guitarist and vocalist Justin Brush (Canopy, Drifter), whose contributions to the band’s 2014 EP Thorn had proven indispensable. For the more spacey and ethereal B-side “Thoth,” the band recruited bassist and vocalist Spencer Ussery (Big Jesus, Hope Scholar), who had joined the group for the creation of 2009’s Light, as well as guitarist Johnny Dang (O’Brother, Hisself), another longtime friend who had come onboard on to play the Godflesh show. Over several writing sessions, the structure and composition of each movement came into further relief. To provide further texture and ambiance, Henis and Franklin weaved in synths, programming, and samples, essentially stitching the movements into cohesive, free-flowing works.
Although this piecemeal process took longer, it allowed for greater flexibility and a more exacting songwriting approach. What emerged was a study of two opposing yet equally grandiose halves. Heavy side, light side. Visceral aggression versus crystalline beauty. Cold mechanical force versus brooding introspection. The exploration of contrasting polarities has long been a hallmark of IRREVERSIBLE’s music, but, for the band, Vessel feels like the culmination of a long creative journey.
“SINS was constructed in an identical manner,” Henis explains. “It just took 17 years for it to come to fruition. We released the dual EPs Thorn and Plucked Up By the Root in 2012 in which we ‘split’ our sound and explored the dualities that our music is able to encompass. We used a similar approach with these songs, ‘Esus’ being a more disgusting and dissonant sound, [and] ‘Thoth’ embracing a more beautiful and triumphant element.”
With its twin side-long epics, Vessel feels something like an act of rebellion. Against pacification, easy comfort, and convenience. Against short-form screen culture rapidly diminishing our attention spans. It’s a record that demands patience, curiosity, and imagination to reveal its secrets. Although the record explores—among other themes—mass psychosis, the terror of physical decay, dreams, and death, nothing is spelled out. As a listener, you’re set adrift, left alone to interject your own narratives and meanings. The experience rewards stillness, a willingness to listen attentively and examine your thoughts. In short, it requires effort and mutual participation. For IRREVERSIBLE, this labor is part of the point. Whereas on former releases they had chosen to sever long movements into more digestible tracks, this time they decided to trust their instincts and leave them whole.
“In the past we’ve made some decisions based on what we thought the zeitgeist was moving towards,” Henis says. “In my opinion those were some of the worst decisions we have made during the course of the band. These longer compositions come natural to us and really embrace the cinematic feel we have always been striving for. We could have split the movements up into smaller pieces similar to what we did on our first EP AGE, but we decided to embrace their true nature and leave them intact.”
With that said, Vessel remains eminently listenable. What it lacks in specific song breaks it makes up with stormy interludes and swooning, atmospheric lulls that serve as rest stops along the record’s harrowing highways. For all of its bruising riffs and grim intensity—not to mention Brush’s punishing vocals—“Esus” tempers its harsh severity with enough hypnotic repetition to lull you into a trance. Rather than bashing you repeatedly with more and more violent outbursts, IRREVERSIBLE prefer to let you to stew in the oppressive darkness. As your mind and ears adjust, an assortment of vibrant samples and textured sounds swim into your periphery. Are they context clues to illuminate the group’s grand designs or an array of mysterious asides? That’s for you to decide.
Given its dramatic intro and cascade of chiming guitars, the opposing “Thoth” will remind many listeners of Explosions in the Sky’s moody post rock. It’s music built for total immersion with plenty of loud-soft dynamics and tension-filled climaxes. But whereas the Austin juggernauts preferred to gradually build their soundscapes into majestic peaks before bursting into heart-stopping crescendos, IRREVERSIBLE take a more winding and unpredictable path to cathartic release. The song isn’t afraid to indulge in languorous stretches or unexpected detours, but even when the music slips into a meditative acoustic lull, you can’t shake the feeling that there is something tugging at you from below the surface.
That’s part of what makes Vessel such an enveloping listen. It’s constantly trying to interact with you. It pokes and prods, confronts and confounds. Each passage feels intentional, a meticulous assemblage of lighting, composition, and detail that plays out like so many frames of a film. When writers describe music as cinematic, they often conflate it with instrumental music or music that blends into the background. By contrast, Vessel gives you a sense of landscape and imbues an emotional weight. It paints an array of vivid scenes—some bleak and haunting, others lush and wondrous—and then welcomes you to explore them. Like an abstract and poetic movie, there’s little exposition to guide and lead you through. Even the movie samples that are stitched throughout the fabric of the album are open to wide interpretation. For Henis, the liberal use of film clips isn’t just a means of merging his two favorite art forms—it’s also an opportunity to document his own personal journey and share it with the audience.
“Film has been such a huge influence on the band since the very start,” he confides. “A big part of my role in the band has been choosing the films and placement for the samples. My partner and I watch a ton of movies. We’re at The Plaza or renting from Videodrome 4-5 nights a week. Eastern European art films (The Hourglass Sanatorium, Transit) and Asian slow cinema (Memoria, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell) have been major discoveries for me in recent years so I wanted to embrace that with the album. David Lynch has always been an idol of the band, and his passing was definitely an impetus for our choice of Blue Velvet being used in ‘Esus.’ The Beast was my favorite movie of 2024 and the themes around memory really resonated with the lyrical ideas I was exploring in ‘Thoth.’ We had used the sample from Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. during the SINS reunion show, so I wanted to make that connection from the live set to this album. Grey Gardens is just an incredibly poignant documentary about recollection, loss, and memory.”
With Vessel, IRREVERSIBLE have emerged from a decade-long hiatus with greater confidence and a renewed sense of purpose. The foundation and pillars that made the band so beloved remain steadily in place, but they’ve been augmented by entirely new vaults and buttresses. They’ve grown bolder and somehow less complacent, once again proving their skills as master craftsmen. In the process they’ve erected one of their finest albums, one capable of snapping me out of my stupor and making me listen intently again. What comes next remains to be seen, but Henis feels confident this won’t be the last we hear from IRREVERSIBLE.
“We’ve discussed the possibility of another show in the fall with some of our other favorite local acts, but we’re still discussing details around that,” he reveals. “Vessel was actually conceived as a three-part movement, and we have several riffs and ideas connected to that piece that will hopefully be revisited at some point in the future.”
IRREVERSIBLE will celebrate the release of Vessel tonight, Mar. 21, at the EARL alongside Hubble and Malevich. Doors open at 8 pm. Admission is $20. 21+ to enter.
More Info
Bandcamp: irreversible.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @IRREVERSIBLE
Instagram: @irr1086