Nepal Death never sounded like a band that wanted to be filed neatly in the record store. With Pilgrims and Psychonauts they’ve doubled down on that instinct and made something that’s too heavy for the cosmic folk crowd, too freaked for the stoner riff bros, too raw for the synth fetishists. It’s not really about fitting in anywhere. This thing unravels like some cursed mixtape smuggled out of a temple basement, equal parts fuzz-rock, trance dirge, ritual chant and bad-trip disco.
There are fourteen tracks but it doesn’t feel like fourteen separate things. More like one crooked thread winding through a night that doesn’t end. Sitars scrape and spiral, guitars lurch between hypnotic and unhinged, synths wheeze like broken organs. Percussion is everywhere – hand drums, pounding floor toms, something that sounds like oil barrels being hit with sticks – layered into this driving, slightly unsteady rhythm that keeps pulling you along.
The production is gloriously unclean. You hear the hiss, the bleed, the clatter of too many instruments fighting for space. That’s what makes it work. Instead of a polished studio trip, it feels like you stumbled into a warehouse ritual with thirty people all contributing whatever noise they could muster – members from Soundtrack of Our Lives, Øresund Space Collective, Papir, whoever happened to wander in. It shouldn’t hold together, but somehow it does. The chaos becomes the glue.
Musically, it swings from heavy psych riffing to passages that sound like Bollywood horror soundtracks left in the sun too long. At times there’s a rolling groove that makes you want to move, then it slips into a drone that pins you to the wall. Voices chant, sometimes tuneful, sometimes just muttering in rhythm, like mantras delivered through a blown speaker. It’s hypnotic, and occasionally ridiculous, but that’s part of the pull – it’s both deadly serious and tongue-in-cheek cult theatre at the same time.
Nepal Death’s world is not the paisley daydream of retro psych, but something murkier. It’s more Charles Manson’s fake Krishnas on speed than Summer of Love. More roadside shrine than festival stage. If Goat opened the door a decade ago to this ritual-psych aesthetic, Nepal Death walk right through with incense smoke in their eyes and a busted amplifier slung over the shoulder.
You can dance to a lot of it, but don’t expect to feel comfortable. The grooves are too unstable, too full of shadows. By the end of the record you’re not sure if you’ve been to a party, a sermon, or an exorcism. That’s the beauty of it. Pilgrims and Psychonauts is not background music. It’s a crooked ritual disguised as a rock record, and it doesn’t care whether you make it out the other side intact.
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Released by Kali Psyche Records on September 12, 2025
Music source for review – Grand Sounds PR
