Photo by Mike Truehart
When Rivers of Nihil released The Work in late September 2021, they knew it was significant – just not how significant. At almost seventy minutes long, The Work was a Floydian concept album, layered with up to eighty or ninety recording tracks per song. Looking back, guitarist Brody Uttley describes it as “massive, dense” and “stuffed to the brim”.
Conceived of, written, and released, during the COVID pandemic, The Work opened a door onto a harsh landscape of inner torment. Songs like “Clean” were sheer confrontation, as frontman Jake Dieffenbach seemed to embody the rough demands of capitalism itself. On one of the album’s standout tracks, “The Void from Which No Sound Escapes”, the band’s music reached a Saturnian level of intensity, where the myth of the titan who ate his children was reversed: “I tear out my being/And feed it to my children/It keeps them sick with poison/Addicted to these noises”. The planet Saturn is known as the Great Teacher, and when it passes through your life, hard lessons are about to be learned.
The power of The Work lasted well beyond its release, creating a shockwave through the ranks of the band. As they began touring the album, it seemed to take on a life of its own.
“I always imagine this record to be more of a living thing, self-referential in the way that it recognises our emotions as people,” bassist and vocalist Adam Biggs said in an Audiotree session interview in 2023. “It has a lot to do with what we do as work. So, bringing this whole album out like we’re doing right now, working through it, is part of the story.”
The album cycle was challenging and relationships within the band were tumultuous. Dieffenbach abruptly left Rivers of Nihil mid-tour with The Contortionist in October 2022. They spoke subsequently of the “gross irresponsibility” of his behaviour before letting him go. The band was playing the album in full at that point, just to prove to themselves that they could. But the material seemed to exert a baleful, transformative influence, akin to a piece of prophecy. Poison was working itself out of their system.
“A lot of heavy, dark stuff happened during the time that we spent touring on that album,” says Uttley on a Zoom from the band’s rehearsal space. “I'm not really a huge believer in magic and stuff like that. But at certain points, I swear it felt like we were living out a lot of what was being written about on that album. It’s so strange to me. There was just so many instances where I was just like, ‘It feels like we're living this album on this cycle.’”
Biggs took Dieffenbach’s place as the band’s lead vocalist. He had long provided the band with a secondary scream, but nonetheless he took to the gutturals with almost supernatural ease. As the band’s lyricist, the words rolled off his tongue. The diagnosis of the band’s personnel problems, and the solution, were encoded in “The Tower (theme from ‘The Work’)”, the opening song on the record: “I let this season get to me/And it's my fault/I let them take it all away/There's no use in all this guilt surrounding us/Pick up your feet, let's go”.
Rivers of Nihil picked up their feet. The reason why their new self-titled record is such an astonishing triumph is because of the arduous time that preceded it. They were shaped by what they went through, and it forced them to make hard changes, and for the better.
From the beginning of their existence, Rivers of Nihil reached for self-transcendence. It’s everywhere in their music and lyrics. From the blood-rooted slovenly grind of “Soil & Seed” from 2013 debut The Conscious Seed of Light – “Youniverse within me/Soil & seed radiate energy/Given form to infinite divinity” – through to The Work, explicitly referencing the system of inner work towards attaining higher consciousness devised by early twentieth-century philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff.
On 2018’s Where Owls Know My Name, and particularly the title track, the band had a major breakthrough. They gave their punishing yet progressive death metal self-exploration an overt cosmic sheen, largely through the interpolation of Zach Strouse’s alto saxophone. A loose concept album about an immortal man witnessing the last days of Earth, the green-hued woodwose figure on the album cover became an avatar for the band. They seemed to be growing out of the acorn of death metal, their musical tendrils flourishing; turning into a mighty oak of a different nature, bordering on the extraordinary.
At the heart of Rivers of Nihil has been the human experience. On “Hollow” from Owls, a soothing mellotron introduction gives way to the pulsating hammer-beat at the album’s centre: “As I walk through the shallows of my distant mind/I see the forms of faces I had long forgot/They search and reach, though their secrets I will keep”.
The song twists and strains like it wants to uproot itself. Rivers of Nihil deal in the bigger archetypes of lived experience; on Owls they imbued them with mythic significance. The soundscape of Owls interacts with our unconscious, conjuring images like the otherworldly humanoid on Dan Seagrave’s superb cover. It explores a similar terrain to Robert Holdstock’s 1984 fantasy novel Mythago Wood, where the protagonists are in thrall to the myth imagos of cultural memory conjured in an ancient woodland. Like Holdstock, Rivers of Nihil are manifesting these images in our imaginations and peripheral vision: heroes and desired objects of our ancestral past.
Heroes of the First World War haunt the song that announced Rivers of Nihil’s determination to carry on. When the band entered the studio soon after Dieffenbach’s departure they sought to steady the ship with a new single. As a four-piece, Rivers of Nihil went into recording that 2023 single, “The Sub-Orbital Blues”, as they meant to continue. “Our dreams will orbit the earth forever”, it begins, as the band explores inner and outer space simultaneously.
The song, also the opener on Rivers of Nihil, quelled any concerns amongst the band’s fanbase that Rivers of Nihil might be mortally wounded. Whereas the saxophone was a novel extrusion on Owls, here it is absorbed in a richly layered, more overt melodicism. During its exultant bridge section, sax and guitar motifs seep out of the music like blood from the palm of a hand crushing a stone.
Uttley confesses he didn’t know what to expect after Dieffenbach’s departure. But the three-part clean vocal harmonies of Biggs, guitarist Andy Thomas and drummer Jared Klein convinced him that Rivers of Nihil were capable of being nothing less than a “death metal Queen”. Alongside “The Sub-Orbital Blues”, the band laid down “Water & Time” and “Criminals” from the new album, as well as The Work B-side “Hellbirds” in one exorcising recording session.
Uttley and Biggs have known each other since they were kids in small-town Pennsylvania. They played in a band together in high school. They trust each other implicitly. Any conversations about bringing in a potential new outsider frontman soon dissipated. The new music also encouraged Uttley to return to first principles. The Work had been like a soundtrack album, written on keys with the heavy metal worked in afterwards.
“Fifteen guitar tracks and a piano track and an orchestra, and a theremin and a mellotron and just all this stuff,” he smiles.
This time, he wanted to make sure the core elements of the live band were “bulletproof” before bringing in any embellishments for Rivers of Nihil. The riffs were the thing that had to drive this new era of the band forward.
“The Work goes down every single hidden path you could possibly go down, right?” says Uttley. “I guess I just wanted to reel it in a little bit more on this record, and look back at our four records that we've put out before, and be honest with myself and ask: what are we good at, and what aren't we good at?”
This rigorous self-analysis has given birth to a crystal-clear set of songs – hard and sharp and brutal and often beautiful – where developing an idea to its furthest reaches gave way to focusing more on (Uttley pauses before he commits to the word) “fun”.
Alongside the riffs and vocal confidence on the album, is the sheer annihilating power of its drumwork. I’ve rarely heard an album with such a commanding and overpowering display of double-bass playing since Fear Factory’s 1995 classic Demanufacture.
“It's funny you should say that, though, because the second song on the record, ‘Dustman’, the working title for that song was ‘FF’, for Fear Factory,” says Uttley.
“Dustman”, named for the colloquial British term for a waste collector, is an oblique exploration of someone “scraping the bottom” of society, according to Uttley. Biggs’ imagery elevates it to a metaphor for grinding urbanism, as does its oblique, shower-of-light chorus: “Hot metal blood flows through concrete vein”.
On Rivers of Nihil, the band has successfully moved on from a broad, exploratory concept album with a concise, catchier follow-up, reminding me of how Mastodon followed their 2009 magnum opus, Crack The Skye, with 2011’s The Hunter. Rivers of Nihil’s achievement is maybe even greater though, since Rivers of Nihil at once supersedes The Work and makes the latter seem like a greater accomplishment in its rearview mirror.
There’s only two songs over six minutes long on Rivers of Nihil, and at least one of them, “Despair Church”, is a downright masterpiece. Uttley clearly remembers hearing it for the first time at the end of the day when he’d usually be concentrating on mixing with album producers Carson Slovak and Grant McFarland, who have worked on all of the band’s albums since 2015’s Monarchy at their Atrium Audio studio.
“‘Despair Church’ was the song that I had the most visceral response to when I heard it for the first time,” says Uttley. “The chorus especially, I was like, ‘That's a chorus, man’. I got chills, maybe teared up a little bit. I don't know. I'm not gonna say. But that was definitely the song that hit me the hardest.”
Not unlike “The Void from Which No Sound Escapes” from The Work, “Despair Church” berates and soothes in equal measure. Whereas the former describes its protagonist “Drifting in and out of life/Like curious moonlight”, “Despair Church” is a knife in the heart of the human condition – “this holy place of hopelessness”: “Born in darkness of the infinite/Was there goodness that they hid within/Writhing monkey soaked in ignorance/Meant to struggle with significance”.
“Andy actually came up with the opening riff on that song,” says Uttley, who writes about 80% of the band’s music. “Then he came up with the bridge part that leads into the chorus, and then I wrote the chorus in response to the bridge. And he wrote the verse riff too. So that was a real call-and-response song between Andy and I.”
Uttley’s surprise and delight at the song’s development was compounded by the contribution of saxophonist Patrick Corona, when he laid a solo on top of the song’s reprised ending of Uttley’s piano and McFarland on cello. “Man, this takes it to a whole other level,” Uttley remembers thinking.
Even when the band veer into the diabolically political as they do with recent single “American Death” (“I’m Kaczynski, Capone and Kennedy/I’m the goddamn American dream”), Rivers of Nihil is the sound of a band truly reaching beyond itself and grasping at the unknown. That they’ve produced their best album yet is testament to their ambition, imagination, creativity, and perhaps most importantly, resilience.
“I think from the beginning, we just always wanted more, and wanted to reach beyond,” says Uttley. “That’s been the driving force behind everything that we've done as a band, and, more specifically, within the last four years.”
Rivers of Nihil did The Work. It was challenging, painful and vital. Now, with Rivers of Nihil, we get to enjoy the fruits of their labours.
-----
Rivers of Nihil arrives May 30th via Metal Blade Records. Order the album - HERE
Be sure to catch Rivers of Nihil live on the Aggressive Progressive Tour along with support from Holy Fawn, Inter Arma, and Glacial Tomb. A complete list of dates and cities can be found below.
RIVERS OF NIHIL w/ Holy Fawn, Inter Arma, Glacial Tomb:
5/27/2025 Pike Room @ Crofoot – Pontiac, MI
5/28/2025 Reggies – Chicago, IL
5/29/2025 The Cabooze – Minneapolis, MN
5/30/2025 Bourbon Theater – Lincoln, NE
5/31/2025 Bluebird Theater – Denver, CO
6/01/2025 Metro Music Hall – Salt Lake City, UT
6/03/2025 Rickshaw Theatre – Vancouver, BC
6/04/2025 El Corazon – Seattle, WA
6/05/2025 Dante’s – Portland, OR
6/06/2025 Goldfield Trading Post – Roseville, CA
6/07/2025 Teragram Ballroom – Los Angeles, CA
6/08/2025 Brick By Brick – San Diego, CA
6/10/2025 Nile – Mesa, AZ
6/11/2025 Launchpad – Albuquerque, NM
6/12/2025 Jake’s – Lubbock, TX
6/13/2025 The Rail – Ft. Worth, TX
6/14/2025 Come And Take It Live – Austin, TX
6/15/2025 Scout Bar – Houston, TX
6/17/2025 Basement East – Nashville, TN
6/18/2025 Eulogy – Asheville, NC
6/19/2025 The Canal Club – Richmond, VA
6/20/2025 The Meadows – Brooklyn, NY
6/21/2025 Fairmount Theatre – Montreal, QC
6/22/2025 Lees Palace – Toronto, ON
