MIZMOR
Up goes the boulder, down it rolls, and A.L.N., the one and only protagonist of Mizmor (מזמור), walks back down to push it again. He has done so since 2012 in Portland, Oregon, in a project whose songs began as prayers and grew into questions about consciousness, mankind, and the future, answered with persistence. Along the way he has joined forces with Thou on Myopia (Gilead Media, 2022) and with M.S.W. of Hell on Alluvion (Gilead Media, 2025). Prosaic (Profound Lore, 2023), his fourth full-length, opens in a furious rush, turns more thoughtful, and sounds rich and almost warm even at its darkest.
Everything is recorded, mixed, and produced in A.L.N.'s home studio, on a clock that belongs to him alone, and ideas are allowed to sit until the album works out who it is. The patience is in the body of the music: icy tremolo that burns cold in the teeth, southern weight that settles in the knees, glacial ambient stretches where the breath eases, and hymn-like melodies that rise out of the wreckage. A folk-tinged acoustic passage can edge towards hope before a brutal riff flattens it, and a voice that starts as raw shrieks ends as ragged roars. Beneath the heaviness runs a search for light that may not be there, and the odd freedom that comes when towers of falsehood fall.
WHAT TO EXPECT
Mizmor sets tend to open with a blast beat assault of several minutes, then the brakes go on and the whole thing sinks into funereal sludge doom. The transitions give the sound a suffocating density, and live it converts the claustrophobic heft of the albums into an overwhelmingly physical experience. Torrential riffs and oppressive drums are offset by lighter passages, and the guitar distortion is left to ring out and decay into silence as the next movement arrives. Mizmor are punishing and meditative at once.
