Faerie Ring – Faerie Ring
King Volume Records – 2026
Rock, Metal, Doom, Psych, Garage
Rated: ****
A glorious new chapter awaits! Why yes, this is the kind of record that is suddenly thrust upon you. Like a legendary object… Unearthed in some long forgotten crypt, the ancient riffs are still glowing beneath all the gathered dust. It only takes a bit of electricity and the alignment of the sun, moon and stars… And guess what just happened? That’s right, Faerie Ring’s self-titled third album is alive!
Faerie Ring take the vocabulary of vintage doom, hard rock and heavy metal, and transformed it into something colorful, spacious, psychedelic and deeply personal. Yes! Released through King Volume Records, this is a sonic rebirth for the Evansville quartet. And not just because a new drummer, Matt McGuyer has taken place behind the kit. These are ten songs steeped in seventies hard rock, proto-doom and heavy metal, yet illuminated by the colors of modern psych, stoner and garage. The sound is enormous! Dusty, but never suffocating. There is space between the riffs, a wind circling around the drums and a strange cinematic light flickering behind all the fuzz…
New Gods and Fattest Witch open the flood gates, vintage amps burning like funeral pyres while melodies rise through the smoke. Those fumes are always there, like a long lingering dragon breath, the smash ‘n grab openers instill that echoing garage metal grime and the rest of the album never lets it go. Making the following Biggest Hit not the instrumental interlude it might seem at first, but a way to propel that gritty and grimy sound ever forward.
Draggin’ swings with a mischievous grin and a bluesy swagger, whilst Howling At The Misty Moon rolls forward like some ancient beast awakened beneath a blood-red sky. But beneath all the fantastical imagery one might see listening to these tracks, lies something darker. Love, loss, loneliness and existential dread haunt these songs, giving the record a beating human heart beneath all that beautifully distorted armor. Even though there is always a current of cathartic elements underneath. Death is real, but so is love. But ‘so is love’ might not be easy to partake in when No Surrender translates the perspective of someone living in Gaza during this horrible war.
Lost Boy seems destined to ring on forever and into legend, as it translates the universal sense of defeatism, in a casual resignation kind of way. Constantly turning on its own heels, swinging riffs like fists and drums like the swaying sense of anger. It all turns massiveness inside out, and perhaps this is partly in debt to Jonathan Nuñez of Torche, giving it all a flattening everything in its path kind of effect. It has shaped Faerie Ring into something broader, wilder and heavier. It’s something Nuñez saw and heard, but Faerie Ring always knew was there…
And for every track that follows you can hear they’ve been looking at themselves constantly, wanting to lay bare all they know, went through and want to sound like. Faerie Ring speaks about influences like Boris, The Scorpions, Torche, Thin Lizzy, and Crowbar and surely, you might hear something that might echo a moment of those bands. But Faerie Ring is much too big now, and none of the shadow those bands cast can touch Faerie Ring’s own identity.
Faerie Ring might just have discovered themselves and a new kind of doom to boot. This is doom with color, stoner rock with a soul, blues with a bite and vintage heavy metal reborn beneath a blood red moon. A glorious new chapter! And a must hear and see for all heavy rock fiends!
And guess what… The album comes out on King Volume Records on August 21st. But we’re honored to give you all the FULL ABUM PREMIERE for Faerie Ring’s self-titled masterpiece, a day early, on Thursday the 20th! So, head on over to their bandcamp to check out the first two singles and return to the HiVe this Thursday for the FULL ALBUM PREMIERE!
(Written by JK)
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