Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean – Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On (EP)
Release Date: 20th February 2026
Label: Redscroll Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Sludge, Doom.
FFO: Thou, Primitive Man, Konvent, Graves at Sea.
Review By: Jeff Finch
Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean’s goal cannot be anything other than making listeners fear the depths, their upcoming EP less like a collection of songs and more like being dragged, slowly and deliberately, across the ocean floor with a lungful of saltwater.
Vocally, there is genuine pain, nary an ounce of false performance, instead the kind that feels ripped straight from the deepest trench of the psyche. Every scream lands like it cost something to expel, like it tore on the way out while, instrumentally, the band takes us further into the depths of the very worst the ocean bottom has to offer: feedback is caustic, not just background texture to highlight the razor sharp riffs. It howls, lingers, swells into suffocating walls of noise that actively ratchet up the listener’s discomfort. You’re not meant to sit with this EP or this music casually; it presses in on you from all sides, claustrophobic and unrelenting.
The pacing is glacial in that familiar, punishing way, akin to the way legends Primitive Man crawl over shards of molten glass and screws and Lego pieces for fun. Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean drags us listeners through a wasteland of nothing but the most agonizingly painful pressure points and concentrated force, driven to the brink, but where the band separates itself from other abrasive doom metal bands is in the propulsion beneath the weight. There’s a subtle forward momentum here that makes it feel strangely more alive, even borderline positive by comparison, though being crushed under the depths isn’t much more enjoyable than succumbing to the elements above water.
It moves. Not quickly, not mercifully, but enough to keep the misery surging rather than stagnating. It’s oppressive, it’s emotionally raw, and it feels like staring into black water and realizing something is staring back. Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean wants you to feel everything you hear and experience every sensation it slips into one’s psyche. It’s brutal, cruel, cold, and callous, and easily one of the heaviest things that will be released in all of 2026.
(5 / 5)
