I have been flabbergasted at the sheer amount of times in the last few years I have had to write an album review that starts with “who would have ever though THIS band would be back from the grave”, but genuinely never as much as I was to see the announcement for the first new Warning album in twenty years. Not because Patrick Walker, main songwriter of both Warning and 40 Watt Sun, had recused himself from writing music, but more so because he hadn’t. Where and how is the line between these projects drawn on Rituals of Shame? And what has twenty years done to both a man and his vision?

The question of choosing whether to release Rituals of Shame as a new 40 Watt Sun record or a Warning record was one that Walker had to think about for himself also. 40 Watt Sun have been steadily putting out music in the years since Warning’s activity ceased, with 2024’s Little Weight even flirting with a more dense sound that hearkens back to the project’s early days, when there was less separation between the two. Though Walker considers all his music to be a holistic body of work, Rituals was an album born from a singularly humbling time in his life, and the music began to reflect a heavier tone that mirrored those feelings of grief and self-despair. Yet choosing the vessel best suited for the music he was writing also undoubtedly shaped the performance here in return. Rituals of Shame is not merely 40 Watt Sun with the gain turned up, nor is it Watching From A Distance: 2; it is the continued growth and raw expression of what I can only say is simply one of the best songwriters I have had the pleasure of ever hearing. From the very first notes of the album-opening title track, the presence of the music takes your immediate attention. It hits you in the chest, the plodding drums and percussive chords giving way to crumbling layers of overdriven feedback, before Walker’s commanding voice arrives to steal the show, as it always does. Here is the point where the separation of what makes this a Warning album is clearest to me: Walker’s voice on Rituals of Shame is not subtle. The often soft lilt of 40 Watt Sun, particularly the Perfect Light-era, here gives way to full-throated expressions of pain, vulnerability, and the strength it takes to find your way through life’s darkest points. Patrick Walker’s vocals and lyrics are far and away the thing that makes any music he writes special to me; he has a way of describing and conveying the human condition, the messiness of emotions, and the enduring nature of love in a way that I do not think the rest of the metal world can touch, to say nothing of music at large.

Rituals of Shame lays bare a person’s soul, through romantic reflection and blunt honesty, and delivered with heartbreaking passion. It is an enormous triumph for a band like Warning to reconvene after twenty years better than before, but the true victory here is the perseverance it took to get these songs into the ears that need to hear them, ears like mine. The struggles contained here, the doubts and fears and self-remorse, are echoes in a way of my own ever-present desire to find a love for myself in spite of my own flaws. Patrick Walker has always been a guide to that end, someone whose work I can look to to find grace in understanding and inspiration in vulnerability. That is the power of Warning, of Walker, and of music as a whole.

– Vincent

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Rituals of Shame is out June 19th via Relapse Records. For more information on Warning, watch from a distance.