The trajectory of an artist is rarely a straight line. More often, it is a dialectical process: a statement of intent is made, a thesis; it is then challenged by a period of complex exploration, an antithesis; and from the tension between the two, a new and more refined truth emerges, a synthesis. For the British metal quartet Conjurer, this process has been uncommonly transparent. Their explosive debut was a masterful thesis on modern heavy music. Their ambitious second album was a challenging, maximalist antithesis.

Now, with the announcement of their third full-length album, ‘Unself,’ due for release on October 24, 2025, via Nuclear Blast Records, the band has arrived at its synthesis. It is a work of startling clarity and profound courage, an album that could only exist because of the dissonant path that led to its creation. It is a record where the deconstruction of a personal identity has directly resulted in the reconstruction of a band’s sound.

Conjurer: A Trajectory Shaped by Dissonance

Conjurer’s ascent was not one of sudden invention but of meticulous refinement, followed by a deliberate and taxing period of artistic complication. This history of action and reaction provides the essential context for the clarity they have now achieved.

The ‘Mire’ and the ‘Ascent’

Formed in 2014 by guitarists and vocalists Brady Deeprose and Dan Nightingale, Conjurer was born from a shared frustration with the perceived creative stagnation of their local music scene. This foundational impulse—to push beyond established boundaries—manifested quickly. Their 2016 debut EP, ‘I,’ released on Holy Roar Records, and subsequent appearances at foundational British heavy music festivals like Bloodstock and Damnation, signaled the arrival of a potent new force.

It was their 2018 full-length debut, ‘Mire,’ that solidified this promise. The album was met with a “storm of attention,” earning widespread critical acclaim and establishing the band’s signature sound: a formidable blend of sludge metal’s visceral grooves, post-metal’s atmospheric intensity, and doom metal’s crushing weight.

The work was not a radical invention of a new sound, but rather a masterful synthesis of existing traditions within heavy music. Drawing from stylistically distinct influences such as Gojira and The Black Dahlia Murder, Conjurer demonstrated an uncommon ability to weave disparate threads into a coherent and devastating whole. ‘Mire’ was an act of looking outward, of mastering the history of heavy music and perfecting a formula.

The years that followed were a period of intense consolidation. Relentless touring across Europe and the United States saw them sharing stages with titans like Conan, Voivod, and Rivers of Nihil, honing their craft and building a formidable live reputation. This momentum culminated in their signing to the international metal label Nuclear Blast Records in 2019, a move that validated their artistic and commercial potential and provided the resources for greater ambition.

During this time, their creative restlessness was further evidenced by collaborations like the joyous, post-rock-inflected project with Pijn, ‘Curse These Metal Hands,’ and a split EP with Palm Reader that saw them covering Slipknot and Mastodon. These projects showcased a band unwilling to remain static, constantly probing the edges of their own identity.

The Maximalist Detour of ‘Páthos’

If ‘Mire’ was a statement of mastery, its 2022 follow-up, ‘Páthos,’ was a statement of deliberate complication. It was a crucial, if challenging, predecessor to ‘Unself’—a work of immense technical ambition that created the artistic and emotional necessity for the directness that would follow. Deeprose has described the recording of ‘Páthos’ as “fraught” and rushed, an attempt to achieve a technically perfect, avant-garde sound that resulted in an “overbearing, impenetrable feel.”

This “maximalist” approach sacrificed the raw immediacy of their earlier work for a dense complexity. Deeprose has admitted that some of the album’s most compelling riffs are “mired” within its intricate structures, making the material less enjoyable and more taxing to perform live. This created a paradox fundamental to a genre so reliant on the visceral, communal experience of live performance: the recorded artifact had been prioritized over the live event.

The lyrical approach mirrored the music’s density; the material was “steeped in metaphor and really ornate language,” which led to misinterpretations and a sense from co-vocalist Dani Nightingale that the songs’ intended meanings were not being effectively communicated.

The album’s sonic density can be seen as a direct reflection of the immense internal pressure the band, and Nightingale in particular, was experiencing. Concurrent with the creation of this complex and difficult-to-decipher music was Nightingale’s personal journey of receiving a late diagnosis of autism and coming to the realization of being non-binary.

The overwrought artistic output mirrored a complex and overwhelming internal world. Yet, for all its challenges, ‘Páthos’ was essential. It laid the “musical and emotional bedrock” for ‘Unself,’ introducing a broader sonic palette, including clean singing, that expanded the band’s expressive toolkit. It was the artistic pressure cooker that made the subsequent release and clarification of ‘Unself’ not just possible, but imperative.

The Heart of ‘Unself’

The forthcoming album represents a profound alignment of personal experience, lyrical intent, and musical execution. It is a work where the sound is inseparable from the message, marking it as Conjurer’s most coherent and purposeful statement to date.

The conceptual spine of ‘Unself’ is a deeply personal journey of deconstructing and reclaiming identity. The album’s primary thematic driver is Nightingale’s experience of navigating their autism diagnosis and non-binary identity, a process which unraveled their long-held view of self and their place in the world.

This journey is encapsulated in the album’s title track, a reworking of the century-old gospel hymn “This World Is Not My Home.” Nightingale reinterpreted the song’s original religious meaning as a secular statement of feeling “out of alignment with, and spurned by, wider society.” This act of re-contextualization is a powerful metaphor for the entire album’s project: the translation of a complex, internal reality into a shared, public art form.

This mission necessitated a radical shift in lyrical approach. Feeling it was “wrong” to cloak themes of inequality and marginalization in the “guarded metaphors” of their past work, the band embraced a new directness. This was a functional choice, designed to ensure their message of connection would be received with absolute clarity. While informed by personal experience, Nightingale is explicit that the album is “not about me.” Instead, the goal is to look outward, to “give those people a voice” who feel “alone, feel misunderstood, feel othered.”

This transforms a personal narrative into a communal statement of solidarity, positioning the album as a tool for mutual recognition. The “heaviness” of the music becomes a sonic vessel for empathy, creating a powerful, protective space for vulnerable listeners. This evolution in purpose has had a tangible effect on the band itself. Deeprose notes that Nightingale’s self-actualization has improved “every single part of what we do together,” fostering a more patient and supportive internal dynamic.

This thematic shift is mirrored by a deliberate sonic one. Working in a supportive environment with producer Joe Clayton, the band consciously “loosened their grip on the desire to fill every moment with sonic obliteration.” Reacting against the maximalism of ‘Páthos,’ they leaned into “utilising space,” creating breathing room that paradoxically makes the heavy sections feel even more intense.

This sonic space is a musical metaphor for the album’s themes. The quiet moments are as vital as the loud ones, representing the psychological and emotional room required for self-reflection and the creation of a safe environment for vulnerable expression.

The songwriting process itself became more organic, shifting from remote file-sharing to in-person collaboration, a necessity for an album demanding such emotional authenticity. The result is a record where, in the band’s own estimation, the “mood, the core of the lyrical content and the music are more aligned than ever before.”

Spotlight on the Singles

The two singles released ahead of the album serve as primary evidence of this new alignment, each showcasing a distinct facet of the record’s identity.

The First Single: ‘Hang Them In Your Head’

The album’s first single is a direct and aggressive manifestation of the album’s social critique. Described as a “spiraling descent into the dismal” and a “hulking track,” it is a blast of focused fury. Nightingale characterizes it as “very pissed and upset,” feeling “like a hardcore song.” This sonic language is a strategic choice.

Adopting the visceral immediacy of hardcore punk, a genre with a long history of direct political messaging, allows Conjurer to signal their intent to abandon lyrical obscurity. The song’s theme is an unambiguous polemic against wealth inequality—about “powerful people stepping on others to make themselves taller.”

The aggression is not abstract; it is a tool of clarity, a sonic corollary to the societal violence being condemned. The accompanying music video, a “performance visual” directed by Matthieu Gill, further reinforces this raw immediacy by centering the band’s physical energy and commanding delivery.

The Second Single: ‘Let Us Live’

If the first single represents the album’s external rage, the second is its vulnerable heart. The song showcases the band’s “intense and atmospheric sound,” with Deeprose noting that they “would not/could not have attempted the intimacy of its introduction or scope of its chorus before now.” Its power derives not from sheer sonic force but from its radical emotional vulnerability.

The lyrics are an explicit and poignant statement on the marginalization of trans and gender non-conforming people, framed as a conversation between the “Oppressed and Oppressor” that culminates in a desperate plea to be allowed to simply exist. The song poses raw, unflinching questions about the source of prejudice, questioning whether it stems from one’s physical self, relationships, or personal suffering.

The track is thematically linked to the instrumental ‘A Plea,’ which samples a speech by Spanish trans politician Carla Antonelli, grounding the song’s personal pain in a global political struggle. This song proposes a different definition of “heavy.”

The act of laying bare such personal fear in a genre often defined by aggressive exteriors is an act of immense weight. The intimacy of its quietest moments is arguably heavier than its most crushing riffs, for it demands not just a physical reaction, but an empathetic one.

Positioning Conjurer in the Metal Scene

With ‘Unself,’ Conjurer is not merely participating in established genres; the band is actively reshaping their emotional and political possibilities, pushing the very definition of what post-metal can be and do in the twenty-first century.

The Interstitial Space

Conjurer’s sound has always existed in the interstitial space between post-metal and sludge metal. Post-metal, which emerged in the 1990s with pioneers like Neurosis and Godflesh, is defined by its exploration of approaches “beyond metal conventions,” emphasizing atmosphere, emotion, and expansive, layered compositions that often incorporate elements of post-rock and ambient music.

Sludge metal, codified by bands like The Melvins and Eyehategod, combines the slow tempi of doom metal with the aggression of hardcore punk, its lyrics eschewing fantasy for raw themes of personal pain and social decay. Conjurer has always navigated the territory between post-metal’s introspection and sludge’s fury.

With ‘Unself,’ they are pushing the “post-” prefix beyond musical structure and applying it to the genre’s very purpose. Early post-metal expanded metal’s boundaries through sonic texture and abstract spiritual intensity. Conjurer is expanding them through thematic specificity and radical empathy.

They are evolving the genre from a vehicle for abstract catharsis into a tool for specific, empathetic communication by centering a narrative of non-binary identity and using their platform for explicit social advocacy.

A Curated Cacophony

This evolution is further articulated by the supporting tour for ‘Unself.’ The lineup is not a random assortment of bands but a curated ecosystem of ideas that functions as a living manifesto for the album. The United Kingdom dates feature Pijn and Death Goals, while the European leg includes Frail Body.

Pijn, featuring producer Joe Clayton, is a post-rock collective known for emotive, cinematic soundscapes, reflecting the atmospheric and introspective side of ‘Unself.’ Death Goals are a ferocious “queercore” duo whose music directly confronts queer identity and oppression, mirroring the political rage and lyrical themes of the new record.

Frail Body, a trio blending screamo and post-hardcore, embodies the album’s raw, cathartic vulnerability. Together, these bands represent the core threads of ‘Unself’: Pijn is the space, Death Goals is the defiance, and Frail Body is the pain.

The tour frames the concert not just as a performance, but as a cultural event that brings the album’s multifaceted identity to life.

Projecting the Whole

Based on its constituent parts, ‘Unself’ promises to be a complete and resonant artistic statement. The album’s nine-song tracklist—beginning with ‘Unself’ and ending with ‘This World Is Not My Home’—suggests a narrative that is not linear but cyclical. It opens with the deconstruction of identity and closes with the thematic source material, implying that the process of understanding oneself is not a story with a neat conclusion, but an ongoing state of being.

The album is significant precisely because it collapses the distinction between the personal and the political, the sonic and the thematic. The band’s newfound musical clarity is a direct result of a newfound personal clarity. The space in their music is the space they created for one another. The vulnerability in their lyrics is a political act in a world that demands conformity.

Heavy metal has long provided a space for themes of alienation and social critique, offering a voice to those who feel marginalized. On ‘Unself,’ Conjurer refines that tradition, moving beyond simple protest to proactive support.

‘Unself’ is more than Conjurer’s third album; it is the sound of a voice being unraveled, examined, and reclaimed in public. In doing so, it offers not an escape from a hostile world, but a blueprint for how to survive within it: by deconstructing the self that society imposes and rebuilding one with intention, empathy, and a sound loud enough to ensure you are heard.

Conjurer’s sound has evolved to carry a message of explicit empathy and social critique. Which aspect of this new, more direct approach do you find more powerful—the sonic clarity, or the lyrical vulnerability—and why?