From somewhere in the Atlantic fog, in a place better known for cows and tax evasion than sonic annihilation, Gurnslinger have kicked down the rotten door with a debut that sounds like it was dragged out of the dirt by its hair. Who Killed the World? is a declaration, a warning flare, a molotov lobbed into the stale room where modern rock’s been napping.
Five tracks. No filler. No apologies. Just the scorched rattle of a band that’s clearly been living in this thing. You can smell the damp stone and dried ale. You can hear the frozen wind clawing at the studio walls. These aren’t just songs — they’re transmissions from the end of something. Maybe everything.
The sound? Hard to pin down, and good luck trying. There’s the low-slung heft of stoner rock in there, sure — amps buzzing like hornets, drums hitting with all the subtlety of a brick — but it’s laced with weird time shifts, punk sneer, and a kind of off-kilter desperation that puts it closer to the old-school danger of early Melvins, Amebix, or even Butthole Surfers in their swampier moments. It’s not “prog,” but it’s not dumb. It sprawls. It mutates. It knows exactly what it’s doing and refuses to do it twice.
The production (courtesy of Steve Sears Jr., who’s no stranger to bands that sound like they’ve survived something) doesn’t sand anything down. Instead, it leans into the mess, lets the feedback sprawl like oil across cracked concrete. Every cymbal crash and barked vocal sounds like it’s echoing across a dried-up lakebed. There’s air in it, but it’s the kind you don’t wanna breathe too deep.
You won’t find big choruses here. No radio-friendly fluff. What you will find is a mood — thick, paranoid, teetering. These songs feel less “written” and more unearthed. Like they’ve been waiting in the earth for the right wrong moment to surface. There’s a ragged propulsion to the whole record — a sense that it might just collapse under its own weight if the band ever stopped pushing forward. But they don’t. Not once.
And yeah — the Mad Max: Fury Road thing? That wasn’t just aesthetic posturing. You can feel that film’s dust-caked pulse running through the bones of this album. Not in a cheesy cosplay way, but in how it chases chaos, how it finds rhythm in collapse. Gurnslinger take that same broken-future vibe and run it through blown-out speakers, down rusted highways, over the bodies of the bland.
The cover of Who Killed the World? looks like it was dragged from the wreckage of some ancient war — not a painting so much as a burn mark on time itself. At first glance, it’s a face, maybe. Animal, human, something in between. Caked in soot, half-erased by smoke and age, it glares out from the bronze murk like it’s been waiting centuries to be noticed. You don’t “look at” this thing — it stares back. And it fits the album like rust on a blade. Just like the music, it’s not trying to be pretty or easy to grasp. It’s heavy, weathered, and cracked with the weight of everything falling apart. A relic from a future that already failed. Perfect.
Who Killed the World? won’t be for everyone. It’s too raw for the polite, too smart for the crusty purists, and way too unpredictable for the algorithm crowd. But for those of us who still believe in music that sounds like it could fall apart or save your life, this is a hell of a first swing.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Album premiere:
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Released by Octopus Rising on May 2nd, 2025
Music source for review – Grand Sounds PR
