Moodring – death fetish
Moodring – death fetish
SharpTone Records
Release Date: 27/03/26
Review by Jon Deaux
7.4/10
I didn’t come here by choice. Neither did you.
You don’t have a choice in listening to a record called “death fetish” by a band called Moodring. You don’t have a choice in entering a castle filled with transvestites in the rain. You just end up there, wet, confused, and slightly aroused by something you can’t quite put your finger on, and wonder how in the hell the night took that turn.
But here we are.
Hunter Young, frontman, founder, bedroom visionary, and human guinea pig, has made a record about losing his body but not his mind. He has been diagnosed with a Neuro-Immune condition in 2022, which made touring “almost impossible.” That’s the sort of news to make you want to sit in bed, wrap yourself in a blanket, and gaze long and hard at the ceiling, contemplating the meaning of life and death and everything in between.
Not Hunter Young, though. He went to the recording studio instead.
He calls his daily regimen of meds and supplements a “Frankenstein concoction of supplements and drugs.” He knows he’s, by his own admission, self-destructing to carry on. He knows this. He’s done the math. And he’s still carrying on anyway.
Now things get interesting.
First, we have the least dangerous track of the record. God help us.
“Half-life” is, in Young’s own words, “a good in-between of where Moodring was and where it’s going” – i.e., the one track your normal friend can stand before the rest of the album drops the gauntlet and eats him whole.
It’s catchy. It’s emotional. It’s, according to Revolver, “enveloped in black-velvet Nu-Metal melodies and bleak-booming breakdowns” – which is probably the best sentence ever written by humans in the entire history of mankind. And it’s 3:30 long, which is precisely the amount of time it should take to open the door, smile warmly, and forget to warn the poor, ignorant soul about the dungeon in the basement.
Criminally accessible, given that it’s, you know, an obituary.
“Cannibal” doesn’t mess around. There’s no ambiguity to the title. Or maybe it’s totally ambiguous. I mean, it’s probably totally ambiguous. Good for Moodring that they’re not commenting. What it is, though, is short, vicious, and over before you can even wrap your head around what happened. Like being nipped by something tiny and then discovering, weeks later, that it was poisonous.
“Masochist Machine” is the first song that really attempts to lay out the philosophical stance of the artist. There’s clearly been someone out there who’s been informed by their own central nervous system that their terms of existence have been renegotiated without their input. And the answer to that, I suppose, is to make the most uncomfortably groovy music about bodily betrayal since… well, since anyone tried. And the drums, I assure you, are real. Young’s very insistent about that.
‘Gunplay (Suicidal 3way)’ – at this point, we must briefly stop, as the tracklist itself is an exercise in considerable artistic nerve. It is, in effect, a title that makes a Spotify algorithm quietly sob into its digital infrastructure. It is, too, as an aside, a banger. The tonal disconnect between the title’s nihilistic directness and the song’s energy is either wildly irresponsible or wildly honest, and in 2026, the two might be the very same thing.
Young is a producer. Young knows the tricks. Young knows, as he says, “when the drums are programmed, when the vocals are tuned to death.”
Young made an executive decision, one that fits with an album about losing control over one’s body and mind, to use real amps, real drums, real takes.
This is either the most coherent artistic decision of the decade or a man punching himself in the face to prove a point.
Definitely both.
‘Ketamine’ is the album’s sensory piece, and if you thought a song with this title would be anything but simultaneously beautiful and deeply unsettling, then you have not been paying attention. Moodring has always been, per Kerrang!’s review of Stargazer, “a cool wave of water lapping over you.” ‘Ketamine’ is that wave, except the water is of dubious temperature and the beach is closed indefinitely.
‘Anywhere But Here’ is the breath of the album, its confession, and it is where the mask slips and where something genuinely and simply sad breaks through. In this context, it is far, far more impactful than any breakdown should be allowed to be. I have been forced to grieve losing the person I thought I was, Young said in one of his interviews. This is that grief, in three minutes and twenty-one seconds, and it is not comfortable, and it is not supposed to be.
‘STFA’ and I leave it to your own devices to figure out what those initials might stand for, but I suspect I’m not alone in making an educated guess – is a track that comes on like a door being kicked off its hinges just as you’d started to cry. And that’s not accidental. This is an album that will not allow you to wallow. It will hand you the shovel and keep on walking.
‘Oxidized’ is corrosion as aesthetic, rust as metaphor, and it’s the sound of something beautiful being slowly altered by exposure to the outside world. And in less skilled hands, this would be a dreary affair indeed. But in this case, it has a certain beauty – the beauty of something that’s been left outside to rust and yet survived.
With ‘Bleed Enough?’, the album is beginning to pose some questions. And they’re not rhetorical ones, either. The punctuation is doing some very important emotional work. There is, after all, a philosophical tradition that asks – or at least wonders – if one has, in fact, suffered enough to earn some respite, some peace, some acknowledgment. And this song plants its flag firmly in that territory.
Next is ‘Sickf_ck’ and I swear, that underscore is doing more work than most punctuation will ever do in their entire lives – is the most structurally Punk song on this album. Short, snappy, and with a contempt that is so refined, it’s become beautiful in its own right. Two minutes and fifty-nine seconds of Young deciding, apparently, that he’s been polite enough.
“Die Slow” is the track on this album that I’d have closed with. It has a certain finality to it. It has a certain melodic grandeur that suggests this is something that has worked through its pain and come to a place – not of peace, exactly, but of acceptance. And on most albums, this is where I’d shine the lights down and head home.
But “death fetish” is not most albums.
The title of the closing track is in lowercase letters, which in this case means that it must be significant.
‘coldmetalkiss’ is 3 minutes and 45 seconds of the album deciding what it wants to be remembered as. It’s not tidy. It’s not clean. It doesn’t conclude in a way that’s cathartic. It concludes in a way that’s more honest: the specific quality of surviving something that hasn’t technically died.
It’s an album called “death fetish.” It ends with still being alive. “I wanted to make an album that was like a vessel, something I could channel anything through,” Young said of their album.
‘coldmetalkiss’ is that vessel. It is drifting. It is still moving. It is still alive. There is rust on the hull. There is still gas in the tank. “death fetish” is an album made by a man who has been told that his story is over. It is made by a man who has chosen to respond to that by creating twelve songs that have titles that can only be described as the subtlety of a letter bomb meant for fate.
It is sleek. It is ugly. It is pop. It is merciless. It is the Stargazer darkness. It is the bedroom auteur fearlessness. It is the producer’s ear for the false. It is the producer’s ear for the safe. It is, too, the producer’s ear for the most fully realized version of what has been building since some kid in a bedroom decided to make music for no one.
The light may have gone out but the room may not be empty.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Half-Life
02. Cannibal
03. Masochist Machine
04. Gunplay (Suicidal 3way)
05. Ketamine
06. Anywhere But Here
07. STFA
08. Oxidized
09. Bleed Enough?
10. Sickf_ck
11. Die Slow
12. coldmetalkiss
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Jon Deaux and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
