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AGENBITE MISERY – Remorse of Conscience

3 εβδομάδες ago

AGENBITE MISERY is a New Hampshire-based trio whose debut album Remorse of Conscience is one of the most ambitious concept records to emerge from the modern extreme metal underground. Formed in late 2022 by guitarist Sam Graff, bassist Cam Netland, and drummer Adam Richards, the band began with a deceptively simple idea: to adapt James Joyce’s Ulysses into an experimental metal album. What emerged from that idea is a 55-minute odyssey of layered sonic aggression and literary depth, an album that blends blackened sludge, dissonant death metal, post-punk, ambient drone, and more into a singular, genre-defying statement of purpose.

The name AGENBITE MISERY is itself a reflection of the band’s literary roots, pulled from a line in Ulysses that references the 14th-century English devotional text Agenbite of Inwit. The phrase, literally “again-bite of inner wit,” or modernized as “remorse of conscience,” became the perfect thematic and philosophical framework for an album steeped in grief, alienation, and the search for meaning in modern life. The band’s name was chosen because it reflects the deep, biting sorrow that pervades the novel and their music. Though the original pronunciation might have been “ah-jehn-bite,” the band opts for a harder, contemporary “ae-ghen-bite” as a nod to their mission of dragging ancient texts into the present.

Remorse of Conscience was written over the course of 2023 and recorded in 2024, entirely self-produced by the band, with mixing by Eric Sauter and mastering by Brad Boatright. The recording sessions were a direct extension of the trio’s collaborative ethos: a commitment to honesty, maximalism, and transformation. Each of the album’s eight songs adapts a chapter from Ulysses, using lyrics pulled directly from Joyce’s prose and reshaping them into brutal, beautiful sonic forms. The band sees each track not merely as a song but as a new translation, an attempt to convert stream-of-consciousness literature into aural energy.

The album opens with “Telemachean Echoes,” a short, grinding burst of power violence and hardcore chaos that adapts the novel’s opening scene: Stephen Daedalus waking from a bitter dream of guilt and loss. The lyrics, shouted and whispered, move from internal shame to furious defiance: “Hyperborean scrotum tightening mother killer” to the repeated cry of “Let me be and let me live, Agenbite of Inwit.” It’s a blistering introduction to the world AGENBITE MISERY has constructed.

From there, the album spirals into “Cascara Sagrada,” a disorienting piece of blackened death metal that explores the quiet horror of Leopold Bloom’s morning routine. Built on warped time signatures, sliding guitars, and sections that move from Slint-inspired indie to full-blown noise assault, the song captures the mundane terror at the heart of Bloom’s lonely life. Lyrics range from meditations on defecation to biblical hallucinations: “Captivity to captivity, multiplying dying being born everywhere, the grey sunken cunt of the world.”

The centerpiece of the album’s first half is the 13-minute “A Charitable View of Temporary Insanity,” a devastating doom-sludge epic based on Bloom’s experience at a funeral. Lurching between minimal ambient textures and towering funeral doom riffs, the song reflects on loss, failure, and the strange bureaucracy of death. The vocals echo with grief: “If little Rudy lived, if I had seen him grown, my son, me and his eyes,” while the final line offers a glimmer of hope: “The blood sinking in gives earth new life.”

At the edge of genre, “Whatness of Allhorse” reimagines post-punk and industrial through a metal lens. With deadpan vocals, massive drum machines, horror-synth textures, and a blackgaze-style climax, the track adapts a scene where Stephen Daedalus debates Shakespearean theory with literary elites. The chaotic freedom of that conversation translates into a song full of bold choices and layered absurdity. “He left her, and gained the world of man,” we hear before the song explodes into shimmering tremolo guitars and a final scream: “But I’ll survive.”

“Bellwether and Swine” brings the record back to pure metal, a pummeling, riff-driven anthem inspired by Bloom’s argument with a xenophobic Irish nationalist. The song weaponizes the tropes of epic metal to mock toxic patriotism, stacking sludgy power chords over blast beats, while spoken word passages echo Old Testament imagery. The narrator’s bile is palpable: “Begob, he got as far as the door. Begob, always some bloody clown or other.”

With “Circe,” the band returns to black metal, this time with a psychedelic bent. The chapter in Ulysses this track adapts is a hallucinatory descent into Dublin’s red-light district. The song mimics this spiral with hypnotic guitar lines, overlapping time signatures, and an atmosphere of dread. At the climax, we’re given one of the novel’s most haunting images: “A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.” It’s a fever dream of guilt and memory.

“The Twice-Charred Paths of Musing Disciples” offers a brief, contemplative interlude. Inspired by the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, the piece uses dungeon synth textures and ambient layering to conjure the quiet moment when Bloom invites Stephen to stay the night, and is turned down. The central melodic motif is taken from actual sheet music printed in the text, adapted into a modern drone setting.

The record closes with the monolithic “Mnesterophonia,” a sprawling, droning epic that mirrors the novel’s final chapter, told from Molly Bloom’s perspective. Drawing on indie rock, doom, and freeform noise, the track builds from intimate to immense. The lyrics pull from Molly’s internal monologue as she drifts into sleep: “When I put the rose in my hair and how he kissed me and I thought well as well him as another…” The final lines of both book and album, “Yes, I will, Yes”, are screamed over a wall of sound, sealing the record with one of the most powerful emotional moments in modernist literature.

Though Remorse of Conscience is steeped in literary references, its emotional core is universal. At every turn, AGENBITE MISERY seeks to translate not just words but the raw human experience: grief, desire, disconnection, hope. In doing so, they’ve created something greater than a concept album, it’s a reinvention of what metal can do.

There is no other band like AGENBITE MISERY, and no album like Remorse of Conscience. This is a project that refuses to compromise, refuses to simplify, and refuses to be easily categorized. Instead, it dares to ask the same question Ulysses once did: can we still find truth, beauty, or meaning in the wreckage of the modern world? And their answer, it seems, is a resounding Yes. Yes, we will. Yes.

About AGENBITE MISERY:

AGENBITE MISERY is a New Hampshire-based trio that fuses literary ambition with the visceral force of experimental metal. Formed in 2022 by guitarist Sam Graff, bassist Cam Netland, and drummer Adam Richards, the band emerged from a shared academic background in literature and a mutual devotion to the most extreme and boundary-pushing corners of heavy music.

At its core, AGENBITE MISERY is a project rooted in transformation. Their work doesn’t merely incorporate influences, it dismantles them, reshapes them, and recontextualizes them within a vision that is as cerebral as it is punishing. Their sound weaves together elements of black metal, sludge, death metal, post-punk, ambient, and noise rock, unified not by style but by intent: to confront, to immerse, and to challenge.

Individually, the members bring a history of musical experimentation: Sam Graff and Adam Richards were longtime collaborators in the avant-garde project UNDER GREEN SUNS and the Boston metalcore outfit VICARIUM, while Cam Netland previously fronted the Connecticut stoner/black metal band COAGULATE. Together, they’ve forged something entirely distinct, a collective voice that draws from their diverse histories but refuses to be defined by any one genre or scene.

AGENBITE MISERY exists at the edge of metal and the margins of modern art, translating abstract ideas into concrete sound with unrelenting force. Whether performing live or recording in isolation, their ethos remains constant: dig deeper, aim higher, and never repeat what has already been done.

AGENBITE MISERY is:

Sam Graff – Guitars / Vocals / Synth
Cam Netland – Bass / Vocals
Adam Richards – Drums / Vocals

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