Available on both digipack CD and on vinyl (with printed inner sleeve and digital download).

   With Gnaw, the quartet of drummer Jamie Sykes (Atavist, Burning Witch, Thorr's Hammer), vocalist Alan Dubin ( Khanate, O.L.D.), Carter Thornton (Enos Slaughter), sound designer Jun Mizumachi and Eric Neuser craft a kind of terminally creepy experimental doom metal, part abject blackened metalcrawl, part hellish mutant free-jazz, part minimalist 70's horror movie score, their songs scoured by Dubin's psychotic witch-shrieks and infested with bits of particulate blackness and electronic debris. It's been over four years since the band's debut, This Face, but they have lost none of their feral power in the interim. The opener "Humming" starts the album off with a piano playing a simple two note melody within a cloud of granular hiss, then erupts into a much more distorted, lumbering version of that two-note dirge, the vocals suddenly sweeping in with a murderous shriek, the background splattered with abrasive distorted textures and rumbling low-end, the sound somehow chilling and beautiful at the same time. And as Horrible Chamber continues to unfold, Dubin's vocal noises are stretched out and transformed into disturbing blurs of low-frequency noise, abstracted to the extreme.

   It's not until the second song "Of Embers" that the entire band finally comes in, lurching into one of their gruesome deformed sludge-metal mutations, the drums stumbling forward in stunted, halting movements beneath the weirdly processed downtuned guitar crush, feedback smeared across the doom-laden heaviness, Dubin gasping and howling like a witch in the midst of immolation. That crushing malformed doom metal eventually breaks apart into clouds of sickly dissonance on tracks like "Water Rite" and "Worm", becoming more abstract, Dubin's shrieks becoming increasingly stretched and processed into slivers of hateful sound, or compressed into noxious ghastly screams that are layered over other, more cleanly sung vocals. Harshly atonal guitars clank over the rumbling black sludge, the music sometimes shifting into a fucked-up discordant noise rock, that halting riffage and the processed phased guitars winding around the complicated off-time rhythms of Sykes's drumming. At times, such as on the song "Worm", Gnaw seem to be mutating into some hideous, hellish version of Am Rep-style noise rock, an electronically damaged monstrosity teeming with swarms of hissing noise and chirping glitch.

  As rumbling sheet-metal reverberations thunder in the distance, the sound will slip into long stretches of bleak, ominous industrial ambience, walls of rumbling murky noise rattling the walls of tracks like "Widowkeeper", a thunderous distant roar that heralds the slithering guitar feedback and murderous whispered vocals, layered with fragments of abstract percussion and heavily delayed electronic noise. One of the album's heaviest blurts of deformed sludgecore is "Vulture", another lurching slit-throated monstrosity where the rhythm section locks into a grueling angular groove, and gobbets of ear-rending noise and those foul screams streak overhead, degenerating throughout the track into heaps of charred, smoking sonic detritus, while the band builds into a bizarre sort of sing-along that erupts at the end. The closing track "This Horrible Chamber" scatters bone-rattling bass-drops across an even more abstract soundscape of crackling noise, distant humming drones and agonized shrieks, before oozing into one final shambling, sputtering doom-dirge, a final blast of schizoid nightmarish disjointed lurch, the deformed and withered heaviness festering with cracked electronic filth. Once again, Gnaw reveals a nightmarish sonic realm where digital sound design, improvisation, aberrant industrial noise, and a uniquely grotesque form of experimental doom metal come together to create one of the most disturbing avant-metal albums I've heard. Recommended.