Listen: New Useless Jams From This Week’s Best New Album

For many reasons, this Friday will be awesome. It will bring the ten gazillionth edition of our heavy new releases round-up, Shit That Comes Out Today. That’s always fun, all those album streams and preview tracks for the releases you’re waiting for and ones that you never heard of. Your job is just to enjoy its fancy new official art (by this superstud) and then cherry-pick your new favorite albums from that morass of awesome metal.

One very new album likely to end up in your basket is by Useless and is titled Absence of Grace. That’s the second reason to sweatily anticipate this particular Friday; an album that expresses a plunge to the bottom of a tar pit. At 35 minutes, it demands just a bit of your time and belies the distance covered by its five songs. Beginning the album is a stumble-paced blackened doom epic, which takes the same two deliberate strides for what becomes an eternity. For the listener, the feeling is crazy; you sense a hundred times the song is about to reach its conclusion and tumble into a pile, but then it manages another step. Then another! Then Absence‘s second track breaks into a sprint and that’s even more harrowing than the persistent staggering (which then returns on the album’s third track). Its final two tracks are below! Crank it up!!!!

Absence Of Grace by Useless is out Friday via Third Eye Temple. Pre-order here.