You don’t really read enough about bands like the Drin nowadays in the great music journalism sense of the world or even mentioned by one those weekly album roundup video influencer pick-me’s. This is because the reality is that the Drin don’t play into the palm of trend nor the smoothed over modern colloquialisms that have consumed the business of making independent rock music in 2026. Their art exists within its own space, and you need to accept that when listening to their music, you’re handing over control to any preconceived narrative beyond letting its impression guide you through.

That can be a frightening proposition for those more concerned with what’s popping on algorithms alongside the adjacent fear of missing out on what’s happening in cool culture. It’s also a dangerously rewarding one that will leave singularity at the forefront of your mind and potentially explode genre world views if you allow it to — and have the patience for it in this content-corrupted world — on the experimental punk collective’s fifth full-length album, I Lost My Way For Centuries.

Led by frontman Dylan McCarthy — also of the equally fierce industrial punk trio Serfs — his collective of avant creative vagabonds of Cincinnati — Eric Dietrich, Dylan McCartney, Dakota Carlyle, Ryan Sennett, Luke Cornett, and Cole Gilfilen — enters the frame bearing their limbs with a bouzouki, a 12-string acoustic, electric guitars, sax, aerophone, bass guitar, drums, synthesizers, tambourine, harmonica, and shakers that unlock realms for them to go deeper than ever here in their pursuit of exploring unknowns.

Consider it a new wave of psychedelia that calls upon broodier elements from across post-punk (“Haven’t Live It Yet”), krautrock (“Cannery Action”), dub (“Spent”), and classic rustic rock bohemia (“I’m Not the Door”) without committing fully to any one sound. Instead, they’re allowing fate to bind them together. Sprawling the double LP and its necessarily indulgent hour-plus listen, McCarthy and company project their present form in shape-shifting vessels of gothic harbingers (“Prophets of Doom” “Fatal Charade”) and cosmic folk mystics (“Moths to the Light”, “Switched On Solar Lightning”.)

In some respects, it feels like kindred spirits from a different dimension in outsider dark arts are being channeled through the Drin’s human selves. Perhaps it’s the other way around. It’s difficult to say when as the further along the listen progresses, the further beyond tangible they can sonically be contained until the clangor in its final track “It Will Call Me in Some Time” verges on full collapse. If anything, they’ve pushed everything that was once known to a new mysterious limit.

Highlights: “Haven’t Live It Yet”, “Prophets of Doom”, “Lost My Way For Centuries”

The Drin’s I Lost My Way For Centuries is available now on Feel It Records.

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