Appalooza – The Emperor of Loss

 

 

Appalooza – The Emperor of Loss
Ripple Music – 2025
Rock, Grunge, Stoner
Rated: *****

Is this thing on? Are you listening? No. Not to me and not like that. LISTEN. With your chest. With your bones. With the part of your brain that still remembers what it means to feel before everything got sterilized and shoved through algorithms. That’s the place Appalooza reaches with The Emperor of Loss, a place where the amps are redlining, the sky is bleeding grunge, and the Horses of Brittany ride again, screaming riffs into the void like warlords of groove.

I hit play on Grieve and for a moment I think I’ve been transported to my favorite time in the nineties. For a moment I feel the room shimmer and vibrate around me, it felt like the walls were breathing. The drums kicked in like a door being shattered in slow motion, and the riff—good God, the riff, wasn’t just heavy, it lumbered and moaned. It groaned under its own weight. This wasn’t some cheap studio polish. This was handcrafted darkness, direct from the muddy hooves of the long-gone stallions.

But don’t get me wrong. This isn’t nostalgia. This isn’t retro. This is grunge after exile, stoner rock fed on glass and diesel, shoved forward by a hobo carrying a shotgun under its coat to blast you with bullets of doom. The guitars don't strum, they snarl! The drums don’t keep time, they summon storms. The vocals? Imagine a prophet who saw the end of the world and decided to front a band instead of starting a religion. That’s Wild Horse. And if he’s the preacher, then Black Horse and Lone Horse are the engine of the apocalypse, low end and thunder wrapped in kerosine and fire. 

And the title track? Emperor? It starts gentle, almost acoustic, almost beautiful, before it turns and bares its teeth like a wolf in the dark. The riff hits like a betrayal. The tones bite your neck. The whole song is a slow-motion fall from grace. You’ll want to hit the floor and stay there, just to make sense of it all. They get proggy. They get sludgy. Tarantula is a monster, a feedback-soaked wall of sound with bloodshot eyes. Stockholm is tight as hell, like a machine built by madmen. Iscariot sounds like Josh Homme fighting Jerry Cantrell in a dive bar, and both of them win.

And let’s talk about the production. It’s perfect because it isn’t. It’s raw, but huge. Polished, but never pretty. Like someone recorded this album inside a collapsing cathedral, surrounded by amplifiers the size of elephants. And then there’s Adios Maria, closing the record with flamenco flair like the ghost of some long-lost love waltzing through a war zone. Who ends a sludge-grunge-prog-doom album with a Latin guitar ballad? Appalooza do. Because they can. Because they feel with very fiber of their being they should.

Did you listen? Now go. There’s a mountain waiting for you. Where you can preach about Appalooza. Take The Emperor of Loss with you and play it loud enough to make your followers true believers, to scare the sins out of the infidels and turn that towering mountain into a trail of dust...

(Written by JK)

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