Hey there, friends. Hope you’re having a good Friday.

Nah, wait, Good Friday was last week. Hope you’re having a GREAT Friday!

I’d like to share something with you that’s just being released today — an album by single-member band Seattleite Laden which I recently discovered through the Metal Bandcamp Gift Club.

For those who may not be familiar, MBGC is essentially a mailing list — which has gone through various incarnations over the years but currently hosted on Substack — where you can share your birthday and your Bandcamp wish list, and every day (well, most days) a message goes out to let everyone know whose birthday it is that day, and a link to their wish list.

It’s a great way to give and receive the gift of music, to support independent artists, and also a great way to discover new suggested stuff to listen to: if you see someone’s list and you think, hey I like a bunch of these bands, chances are you may want to check out some of the other stuff on their list.

Speaking of which, I thought it would be fun to discuss this brand-new album alongside the most recent release from a band of Londoners who Laden have cited as one of their influences: Wren — an album which happened to sneak its way into my list of favorites from last year.

 

Laden – Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (self-released, 10 April 2026)

 

Wren – Black Rain Falls (Church Road Records, 21 February 2025)

 

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Heavy progressive post-sludge. When the riff comes back but slower — except in most cases it isn’t coming back, it’s just slower to begin with. That’s pretty much what you can expect from both of these bands and both of these albums. The most glaring difference being whether you like your post-metal with a side of vocals or à la carte.

Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly, named for a euphemism for something exploding or suddenly falling apart — a term often associated with the result of numerous SpaceX test flights OR perhaps what happened to Twitter when the SpaceX guy got his hands on that company, was self-recorded but engineered and mixed by Chris Fielding, who you may recall as the bassist and additional vocalist for Conan throughout a big chunk of the 2010s. Not only was this Laden‘s first foray with an external engineer, but Fielding also brought in a live drummer (in lieu of the project’s previously programmed percussion), Alex Micklewright.

Without a singer in the mix, this album relies instead on the complexity of its arrangements, pensive atmosphere and intriguing riffs. While the tempo generally seems fairly restrained — slow and low, you might say — things do change up from time to time to keep the listener on your toes. A lengthy section of “Sudden Existence Failure” (fairly obvious what that title is a euphemism for), for example, breaks forth from an otherwise mournful and sparse track, with rapid-fire drumming leading the layers of distorted and noisy guitars. Similarly, the title track is built upon a quicker-paced groove, whereas in contrast, these two are alternated with “Stationary Underwater Wolves,” a personal favorite based on its especially andante groove, and “Dusk Dwellers” with an appropriately dark tone and spacey vibe. Probably the biggest highlight, though, is the closer “Future Rat” that pretty much incorporates all of those moods and styles over its ten-and-a-half-minute length.

Wren‘s Black Rain Falls was recorded and mixed by another big name in the industry: Scott Evans of KWC, who coincidentally served in those exact same roles on last month’s new Neurosis. And the similarities certainly don’t end there: seven tracks filled with deliberate drumming supporting crushingly heavy chords and riffs, all paired with unrestrained gloomy shouting. Sometimes quieter and even slower (much of “Toil in the Undergrowth”; the brief interlude “Cerebral Drift”; the first half of “Precede the Flint”) — leaning hard into the “post” in “post-hardcore” — but only to make the opposing sections (“Betrayal of the Self”; the rest of “Flint”; to an extent the feedback-and-bass-filled closer “Scorch the Hinds”) that much doomier, heavier, bludging-ier.

 

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Digital copies of Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly can be procured here (US).
 
You can grab the Wren album in digital/CD/vinyl formats here (US) or here (UK).
 

 

Laden: Bandcamp
 
Wren: website | Bandcamp
Church Road: website | Bandcamp | Soundcloud | YouTube