Too much has happened in the past ten years that it’d fry your brain if you were to wake up from a decade-long coma and ingest as many headlines as you could via Neuralink. That’s before reaching the news from 2025, let alone this year. So it makes sense that a band reuniting after ten years apart would be more jaded, as is the case with Atlanta’s Irreversible. In their previous incarnation, the trio created sludge metal with a noted ear for melody and patience. They disbanded in 2015 and dispersed across the United States, but reformed last year and recorded a new LP, Vessel, set for release this March, revealing a new cynical and rapt bend. Today, we’re premiering a portion of the song “Thoth,” which you can check out below.
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See, Vessel is comprised of two mammothian tracks, “Esus” and “Thoth,” each reaching 20 minutes, so the attached snippet is merely a preview of the beast. The songs contrast each other sonically but reflect the same philosophy, with the former showing Irreversible’s sludge metal side while the latter is textbook post-rock. As such, “Thoth” paces itself for its long runtime. It unfurls at a pace befitting a group that reconciled long after their youths ended, exuding endurance as the primary operative rather than spontaneous combustion. Put another way, Irreversible are stubborn. They have no problem focusing on a sequence for minutes on end, each cycle microscopically building upon the last, locking into a mechanical rhythm that promotes collective power over individual highlight reels. So, if “Thoth” sounds like it’s missing context in preview form, it’s because it is. The payoffs come from how Irreversible slither between sections, tracing a lineage from sludge metal to noise rock to post-metal to simply post-rock, receding into themselves like a flashlight with a fading battery.
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Vessel releases March 16 via Dipterid Records.
