Barren Path - Grieving (2025) Review

In a sense, Barren Path's Grieving is indeed a debut album. However, one will feel a tensely familiar cataclysm once the needle drops, as such musical debauchery can be conceived and reproduced by only a few individuals on Earth... Or maybe even just one: Takafumi Matsubara. Alongside him is also the infamous gang behind now defunct Gridlink, and the new addition of Mitchell Luna (Maruta, Noisear, Shock Withdrawal) on vocals. You guessed right, modern technical grindcore's deadliest tacticians once again channel their collective fury into a work that's clean-cut as it is merciless, with twelve tracks and barely a quarter of an hour total duration of precision-feral mayhem.

Brevity remains a virtue here. In its compact and tight presentation, Grieving is extremely packed with terrifically moving ideas, going down as a deliberate but masterful tantrum of noise. The violence is directed and quantified, the tempos are cleaved, and the blastbeats constantly dance with cross-sectional riffing. Barren Path moves in confidence and delivers with exceptional clarity, something that is sometimes amiss in grindcore albums, yet this is not your everyday collective we're talking about. There's an unexpressed connection to the clan of No One Knows What the Dead Think and Gridlink, but Grieving isn't nostalgic. The record slices in both ways, provoking internal entropy as well as external terror.

Musically, the band glances slightly more towards old-school death and crossover thrash metal instead of the distinctive cybergrind overload that Matsubara has spewed in the past. Yet, the technical, chaotic edge is fully maintained throughout, and recognized basically immediately when the opener "Whimpering Echo" flares up at mind-blowing speeds. "The snare tone is meaty" and the material is relentless but articulate, with all the micro-fills, pauses and twists perfectly calibrated for maximum impact. As exhilarating as the music feels, it also comes out intelligent, full of nerve nerve and mechanical precision. Barren Path slash and hack towards the ultimate purpose to perfect this form of existential manic-grind, and they almost succeed with Grieving. 

Tracks like "Relinquish", "Subversion Record", "No Geneva", and "The Unreliable Narrator" (if you liked the latest Wormrot album, here we are again) are hallmarks of this sound. The melodic tremolo picking in "Lunar Tear" and the furious fret board maltreatment a la Brain Drill on "The Insufferable Weight" are exquisite, while even the noisy atmospheric respite in "Celestial Bleeding" adds some sort of a strange tenderness, like a moment of negative space among highly ferocious tracks. "Horizonless" is wonderfully connected to the last piece "In the End… The Gift is Death", where the band delivers a final delivers a concluding blast of melodic-death laced grind. I'm not the biggest fan of low-volume spoken vocals like on "Isolation Wound", but the riff in the back is so formidable, you might not even notice.

Despite the overall musical massacre, you would wonder why Grieving, a grind record, might leave you feeling mournful. To me, Barren Path examine alienation and dissolution without failing to keep a self-awareness under the constant duress caused by their creation. It's extremity as an existential spectacle, through brutal techgrind of the highest order from a set of musicians known for their non-stop hustle, (r)evolution and refinement as their own act of defiance. Despite its hostile side, the record's underlying vulnerability and an instant win for me, but what instantly catches the ear, is of course the trademark Matsubara inspiration. They have survived, and they keep morphing into scarier and scarier entities.

To be atoned a flat world

Release: October 31st, 2025 // Willowtip Records
Rating: 4.5 out of 5