Warning : Rituals of Shame
It doesn’t happen all the time, but certainly sometimes trained ears can detect when what they are hearing are songs whose creator has spent years, if not decades, chiseling, reworking, chipping away at and eventually sanding them to what he considers to be as close to perfection as he can accomplish. If such songs were chopped apart lengthwise, at least a couple dozen rings would be exposed on the trunk. The years of care, craft and turmoil aren’t as identifiable as a Caravaggio painting, per se, but that’s one of the differences between music and visual arts: You feel the artistic expression coursing warm through your veins instead of studying and staring at it in awe.
Warning‘s Rituals of Shame is an album effectively 20 years in the making, if not necessarily literally. Frontman Patrick Walker has released plenty of material during that time, but what we have here are five doom-metal masterpieces rather ironically untainted by the very trappings of the subgenre: repetition taken to tedious extremes, fogs of pot smoke so thick that the listener is blinded by what might very well be beauty at the core; overindulgence for overindulgence’s sake. Particularly on songs like “Station,” “Landing Lights” and “Night Comes Dawn,” Walker has created something fresh and new: clear-eyed, focused, minimalist yet illustrious doom metal. Perhaps it’s because he’s reached a transcendent understanding of the human condition, or something like it; the word “love” appears six times in the lyrics to the five songs.
British doom demigods Warning must’ve taken into consideration what fan expectations would be before cementing their intention to revive the name. Two quick but crucial caveats: The only founding Warning member in the band’s current configuration is guitarist/vocalist Patrick Walker; and it’s inaccurate to claim Warning are reuniting for the first time in 20 years, as they also played—and even recorded an album—when they reconvened from 2005 to 2009 and 2017-2018.
With that said, a critical turn of events happened following the second Warning breakup: Walker and current Warning drummer Andy Prestidge formed a new doom crossover band, 40 Watt Sun. That band spurred Walker’s creative juices to flow again, as if a doctor had unclogged one of his arteries. As with most bands fortunate enough to exist in the nascent years of a fairly new genre at the time (doom), Warning’s legacy improved over the years, elevating the band to mythical status (in the metal underground, at least). But 40 Watt Sun—thanks to their stronger stylistic dexterity and willingness to adapt their sound regardless of how it would be received, with forays into slowcore and chamber folk.
One way to look at it is Walker lucked out with both bands at the right time: tried-and-true doom warriors Warning existed when metal was factionalized and subgenres were rigid, while 40 Watt Sun came into being and continue to this day during an era in which metalheads practically demand a fusion of subgenres, bored as they are with metal orthodoxy. That said, Walker is no opportunist: As he recently told Treble, he considered culling together his new material under the banner of 40 Watt Sun but, due to the music’s heaviness, instead decided to resurrect his more purist project, Warning: “I had already decided I would likely play some 20th anniversary shows for [Warning’s 2006 album,] Watching From a Distance. So, I knew I would be playing with the same band again. I figured, let’s release this as a new Warning album, it makes all the sense. … That’s easy to be cynical about it and say, well, that’s very convenient. But that’s really how it happened. It’s the record I would have made now anyway.””
If calling this a Warning album does in fact increase the likelihood of more metal fans taking note, all the better, because this is Walker at his finest. While there’s no reason to believe it’s the last of its kind, other than the 20 years it took to arrive, Rituals of Shame would be as graceful a swan song as any like-minded musicians could muster. “I can’t see beyond you,” Walker croons at the end of the last song, “Teacher.” “And I can’t count to/ the ways I love you.” Scroll even further down the credits and you’ll see the sentiment that Walker wanted to leave the listener with, though it doesn’t appear in one of the songs. It’s a statement that towering English poet Edward de Vere wrote in 1603: “…for truth is truth though never so old, and time cannot make that false which was once true.”
But while it is certainly worthy of noting when a very highly regarded band releases its a collection of new songs after a 20-year break, it’s also important to keep in perspective that Rituals of Shame is far more consequential than what effectively amounts to a piece of trivia. As Walker said in our interview, it would’ve been “perfectly legit” of him to have released the collection under the name of his other project, 40 Watt Sun. It’s even more essential to value what Rituals of Shame is, what it means and what it signifies, because that, well, the whole point of art—right? It is crucial to consider that this is the most earnest and, more or less by extension, the most self-expressive record from one of the royalty in a metal subgenre that tends to be evasive when it comes to the personal but absolutely grandiose when the subject matter involves grand concepts, philosophies or unfathomably large entities such as cosmoses.
What Walker has done with Rituals of Shame is challenge the very idea that a doom-metal album should stay within certain bounds—even if, ironically, doom itself implies a type of agony that has no limits. Instead, and to mix metaphors, Walker has instead made a record that captures him as an open book.
Label: Relapse
Year: 2026
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Warning : Rituals of Shame
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