Neverending

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Neverending is the sixth full-length album from Gothenburg, Sweden stoner/doom trio Monolord — Thomas Jäger (guitar/vocals/keys), Mika Häkki (bass/piano), and Esben Willems (drums) — released May 29, 2026 via Relapse Records. It is the band's first album in five years since Your Time to Shine (2021) and marks a significant creative turning point, recorded in Ashland, Oregon with legendary producer and engineer Sylvia Massy, whose credits include Tool's Undertow, System of a Down's debut, and Johnny Cash's late-career American sessions. Massy reportedly asked the band to send her a decade's worth of material — not just the new songs but stray riffs and half-finished ideas — and curated from there. The band rehearsed 12 songs, recorded 11, and ultimately selected eight for the final album. At 43 minutes across eight tracks, it is the most concise statement Monolord have ever made, deliberately paring down the sprawling long-form structures of their earlier work in favor of sharper, more immediate songwriting.Lyrically, Neverending is by Jäger's own account the band's most personal record, drawing on real life upheavals and shifting away from the religious and existential abstraction of their past work toward something rawer and more relational — what Bandcamp Daily calls "human and earthly matters." Standout track "You Bastard" addresses the fallout of a suicide from the perspectives of both the living and the dead with what the review describes as a "considerate and humane voice," while the epic eight-and-a-half-minute closer "It's Neverending" marks a first for the band: Jäger steps aside entirely, handing vocal duties to former Entombed bassist Jörgen Sandström for the only time in Monolord's history. Massy's production introduces negative space as an active compositional element throughout, giving the album a sound that Riff Vault describes as "either the heaviest they have ever recorded or the warmest, with surprisingly little in between." Chaoszine sums it up aptly: Neverending is "the sound of a band looking back over thirteen years" and deciding to be exactly, deliberately themselves — only a little deeper, and a little more honest about it. Show more