UNMOTHER – State Dependent Memory

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  UNMOTHER
• Duration: 00:38:18
• Available from: 02/20/2026
• Label:

• Fiadh Productions

Streaming not yet available

Five years after their debut “Lay Down the Sun”, it is once again time for Unmother to give voice to the cold, gray and metropolitan settings of the London that gave them birth, shaping a sound from which filter – as if suspended in the rain and in the vapors rising from the manholes – stories of urban alienation, moral decadence and class struggle.
To frame this narrative, punctuated by the painful vocals of the Greek frontman V. (Voak, Τέλμα), a post-black metal in which the British group combines a cold, angular and vaguely dissonant approach, mindful of certain industrial suggestions, with a series of glances launched at the dark wave/post-punk world which – without significantly lightening the textures – broaden the expressive range, nuance some passages, in groove of sober songwriting and careful to keep its politicized message alive.

Riding the hype generated in the underground around a record like “Confusion Gate”, Yellow Eyes could be cited to frame our proposal, at least from a conceptual point of view and the desire to blend harmony and dissonance in a black metal context with a modern and experimental edge, although the boys do not (yet) boast the class and personality of the New York group and the offer contained in this “State Dependent Memory” tends to be more homogeneous and dry than that of the Skarsrtad brothers' band, with a reduced layering work and an atmosphere that only in the very finale – the instrumental “Magda” – allows itself some bright glimpses, between a pastoral-flavored intro and particularly lively synth punctuations.
Having acknowledged this, what we find ourselves in front of is still an album capable of insinuating itself into the weekly listens with the strength of a 'gut' interpretation – from which all the quartet's discouragement towards contemporary society shines through – and of a writing that chooses not to surrender to the clichés of the genre based on alternating piano/forti, powerful crescendos and dilated structures even in the absence of sufficient ideas to support its verbosity.
It is no coincidence that the work lasts just under forty minutes, while the writing reworks a certain type of Norwegian tradition by replacing forests with buildings, snow with concrete, and innervating the songs with influences that embrace both the clangs of Godflesh and the viciousness of Killing Joke, for a flow in which even the cover of “Attiki Victoria”, originally composed by the synthwave project ΟΔΟΣ 55, finds its precise meaning, reiterating the profound organicity underlying the tracklist and the sound imagery of the quartet (in this regard, also look at the artwork).

Ultimately, in a post-black metal panorama often taken by intellectualism as an end in itself and by the reiteration of other people's ideas, Unmother confirm themselves as an authentic and concrete reality, here able – in the wake of episodes such as the opener “My Armor”, the title track or the aforementioned “Magda” – to continue on an artistic path which, in a small way, demonstrates that it is searching for its own voice and its own personality.