Expectation is such a heavy thing when it comes to your favorite bands. You want to support them, to give them room to stretch and create and follow their personal muse (muses? It’s early in the morning) wherever it will take them. But you know deep down there’s a small kernel of…let’s call it yearning…for them to do exactly what YOU want. I can’t help it, you can’t help it, best to just acknowledge the bias and move on. Especially when said favorite band knocks it out of the park by doing both, as Howling Giant have done with their third full-length Crucible & Ruin. An expanded lineup brings new complexities into their prog/psych/stoner rock assault, and the songwriting gets even sharper, aided by a brighter, soaring production that highlights the best aspects of the band.

In the decade of their existence, the Nashville unit have been consistently putting out great, catchy music. You can draw a line from their self-titled EP to debut LP The Space Between Worlds to their incredible split with Sergeant Thunderhoof to the lockdown jam release Alteration that led to 2023’s Glass Future. Following the growth of that journey Crucible & Ruin sounds like an inevitability, the logical next step in a progression that has been nothing but upwards.

You can hear everything coalesce immediately in “Canyons”, the album’s opener and lead single. At close to seven minutes it’s almost the longest track on Crucible & Ruin (misses it by seven seconds), allowing the listener to fully engage with everything that makes Howling Giant what they are: incredible vocal and guitar harmonies, soaring hooks, huge drums and a bottom end bass that seemingly fills the entire soundstage without muddying the arrangements. New member Adrian Lee Zambrano perfectly complements guitarist/vocalist Tom Polzine, and the addition of more acoustic playing fills out the song wonderfully.

Recording for the first time in a proper studio (as opposed to their home studio) there’s a brighter attack in the high end that gives Crucible & Ruin more bite than Glass Future; tracks like “Hunter’s Mark”, “Archon”, and the truly gigantic “Beholder I: Downfall” sound like they tower over the population, inducing automatic volume raising in anyone listening. Nestled in the album’s ten fantastic tracks, I keep coming back to that and its follow-up, the closing “Beholder II: Labyrinth”. Wildly different in tone from its sister track yet retaining the same sense of scale, the two songs feel like the conclusion to all the exploration Howling Giant have done on their previous albums, and present a vast expanse for them to survey on future albums.

I’ve emphasized the grandiosity and aggression of Howling Giant’s progression, but for those craving more intimate moments, the group easily downshifts to provide interludes like “Lesser Gods”, a brief instrumental that really shows off Sebastian Baltes’s bass sound in all its glory. “Archivist” might be their most progressive track, taking tremolo picking and some truly stellar drum work by Zach Wheeler on a grand adventure. “Melchor’s Bones” feels like a logical extension of Glass Future, right down to the television samples.

I could keep going, but by now I’ve probably covered Howling Giant enough on this site to ruin any sense of objectivity I may have garnered over the years. I don’t care; when something is as good as Crucible & Ruin, you want to shout it from the rooftops.

Get on this. You’ll hear more come end of year.

-Chris

---

Crucible & Ruin is available now from Magnetic Eye Records. For more information on Howling Giant, check out their Facebook and Instagram pages.