Not to dismiss any of their contributions to furthering the limits of heavy music prior to this point, but to listen to Neurosis in 2026 — 30-plus years into their career arch and now with a brand new frontman in tow in Aaron Turner of the dearly missed post-metal outfit Isis as well as experimental metal and doom explorers SUMAC and Old Man Gloom replacing disgraced original voice Scott Kelly, who was dismissed in 2022 following admissions of abuse — this sort of feels like a good spot as any time for anyone only now coming into their fold to begin again with them.

Turner’s part is more than just a fitting vocal vessel — a fully-fledged creative contributor behind the creation of the band’s surprise return, An Undying Love For A Burning World — and with this new moon phase for the seminal Bay Area art metal innovators, the hour-plus behemoth of an album has you wondering if they’d have ever evolved to a similar place if it weren’t for the fresh blood pumping into the muscular parts where open wounds once laid exposed.

Take a track like the album’s centerpiece, “Blind”, for example. Across its 9-minute length, we bare witness to — yes, familiar fingerprints of big riffed hammering sludge metal and seismic-staggering rhythm craters from guitarist Steve Von Till, bassist Dave Edwardson, keyboardist and effects manipulator Noah Landis, and drummer Jason Roeder. It’s when Landis is given dead silence and open range with his instrument that they tear the atmosphere right open. It’s here where Turner’s throated hurls in tandem with Von Till’s ascendent melancholia break through the void as meteor beams zip by. When it’s time to plummet back down to Earth, the synergy of these resurgent forces rains down unlike any element we’ve heard come our way from Neurosis thus far. That synth-metal amalgamation bleeds into “Seething and Scattered” and the blade-gliding “Untethered”. You just can’t unsee any of it once you do.

Fresh oxygen flowing through Neurosis’ circulatory system only reinforces the might in all else which its original core four members have always been heavy-handed with in their glorious destruction. “Mirror Deep” is a proper harbinger of doom, whereas “First Red Rays” and “In The Waiting Hours” are bookending premonitions and omens fulfilled in their eerie, densely atmospheric space metal meandering. As An Undying Love For A Burning World‘s concludes in grand spectacle with its longest track, the nearly 17-minute-long “Last Light”, what had been destroyed is rebuilt in an evolution of everything that came before it, ending on a cliffhanger of sorts where something else looms right around the corner. You couldn’t mark the closing of one chapter and the beginning of another any better way.

Highlights: “Mirror Deep”, “Blind”, “Last Light”

Neurosis’ An Undying Love For A Burning World is available now on Neurot Recordings.

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