REVIEW: Primitive Man - Observance

I see your smile in the dark

V.S.

Nov 02, 2025

01:08:20 // October 31st, 2025 // Relapse Records

Scorched concrete is what’s left behind any path Primitive Man drags its corpse through since its inception in 2012, when the band clawed out of the molten seam between doom and noise with a purpose of trafficking in a syntax of suffocation, reverb, and the uncompromising low-end. Their discography reads as an evolutionary chart of collapse, always finding new ways to stretch sound into an ordeal of endurance with each one of their releases, from the debut Scorn in 2013, to the baneful collaboration with Full of Hell (Suffocating Hallucination, 2023). Primitive Man’s conjured environment is vast, contentious, and almost indifferent to human frailty, as every note eventually dissolves into ruin and silence.

The fourth full length album, Observance, stands on the bloodied frequencies of the same crushing sound, yet this time bent toward reflection, sorrow, and even a kind of hope in the bleakness of everything. The Denver trio frames the album as a reckoning with the modern condition, confronting tech-related alienation, corrosion of shared contracts and the futility of accepted promises. Despite that, and with lyrics as forthright as the music itself, a sense of resistance against internal resignation echoes through the record, pushing the mind and body to keep going through the struggle, and to manage the harmful weight on its shoulders. Observance is double the length of 2020’s Immersion, painfully clocking over an hour and bringing back the injuries caused by Caustic (2017) to the surface, but the experience is, as expected, brutally overwhelming.

Nobody would blame you if you claimed this is the heaviest sludge / doom metal band you have ever heard, and this album piles up to the notion perfectly. In the marrow of this album’s psyche lies an untamed beast, asserted by riffs at a glacial crawl slithering through fields of distortion, monstrous vocals and frequent noise / dark ambient junctions. Both meditative and destructive at the same time, with long compositions of tar-thick riffwork at a monolithic pace, Observance echoes like the Earth’s own groan. The bass burrows, the drums hammer with methodical pulse, all in accordance with the highest goal of an oppressive, existential statement of death – doom – sludge demolition.

Already at the opening track, “Seer”, Primitive Man re-enter the abyss as chroniclers and not as visitors. The listener is immediately cast into a labyrinth of dense repetition, feedback loops and soaring melodies pounding a moribund heartbeat. A chunk of forty-odd seconds of shimmering harsh electronics is introduced at the beginning of the second track “Devotion”, but that kind of noise is also scattered around the record (also marking its midpoint with the two-minute interlude “Iron Sights”). At this point, the band teaches and demands patience, a virtue highly useful as the album moves from the end of “Devotion” and the abiding descent into “Transactional”, one of the most ambitious pieces on Observance.

An almost psychedelic undercurrent is in full play at the 14-minute leviathan track “Natural Law”, where the band exerts the most pressure with all its skills in manipulating ambient texture, electronic murmurs, colossal guitars including faster black metal tempos and even acoustic surprises. The shifts are always subtle but profound. “Social Contract” delivers the album’s disheartening thematic spine most clearly, as McCarthy howls toward the end: “things do not have to be this way”. At the last exhale of Observance in the last track “Water”, a band with an once batten-down-the-hatches posture now shades in wounded awareness, risks reflection, but comes out as mature and as intimidating as ever.

In tracing the contours of our exhaustion, Primitive Man has found a point of grim transcendence. Their sound remains terminal, but the intent has slightly deviated; a deviation the band discloses with somnolent acceptance. Observance continues well on this agreed upon route, mercilessly proceeding with waves of both personal and social decimation. It’s uncompromisingly heavy and long enough to beat the vigor out of you, yet its commitment to unease is what makes it so worthy. The band has never lost its grip on the musical vision while deepening into ever denser soundscapes, as if someone would have thought that’s possible after Caustic and Immersion. Grief has never sounded so terrifying.