Buzz Sound: FINAL GASP

Photo by Tyler Hallett

Artist: FINAL GASP, the six-piece of vocalist Jacob Murphy, guitarists Alex Consentino, James Forsythe and Meter Micanovic, bassist Sean Rose, and drummer Eric Lester

Location: Boston, MA

Buzz: Something this wicked way comes from the grips of a Bostonian heavy music band who are eluding much more descriptor than being beyond all else among the damned and entirely their own spirit in sound. If anything, FINAL GASP’s undying DIY ethos formed early on their first two EPs, 2019’s Baptism of Desire and 2021’s Haunting Whisper, harvest the ability to summon several morbid shapes found in darker realms — metal, hardcore, punk, gothic alternative, and shoegaze — and collect them into one one demon driver on their recently released debut full-length, Mourning Moon. Recorded with Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Glitterer,) the effort hears the sextet refining a balance between a fiery charge with a dead-weight lurch nailed together in hook-laden songcraft swervedriving around Jacob Murphy’s proximal echoes from the underworld. Love, loss, and regret engage in FINAL GASP’s eternal battle for the soul, their forces reckoning during those late night hours when your mind allows uneasy thoughts an invitation, and ends up working even harder to exorcise the unwanted Hell unleashed within.

Sound: An out of body experience where the heaviness of your soul is being exhumed by a reaper whose aesthetic is DIY Danzig (Misfits skull tats a given) armed with a cassette deck and a Maxell mixtape brim full of ’80s alternative, ranging from metal to post-punk, and its playlist written in blood.

Recommended: “Botched Ritual”, “Blood and Sulfur”, and “Mourning Moon” off their recently released debut full-length, Mourning Moon

FINAL GASP’s Mourning Moon is available now on Relapse Records.