12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 6It’s cool to have a new favorite band. Until this year, my answer all this time had been… Nightwish? They were the first band I ever got really into, aaaall the way back in middle school, and while I still think all of their eras are great fun, treating them as my number one hadn’t been sitting right with me for years. And now, I’ve got SubRosa.This is a band that’s a bit tricky to pin down genrewise. They’re definitely doing doom metal, with a very rich and layered approach to the production. Like a lot of good doom, loudness itself is used as its own pseudo-instrument, and increasingly so as their albums go on. Definitely also some “psych” and “sludge” and maybe even some “post” thrown in there for good measure. But their most notable aspects are not RYM tags and are instead their dual electric violins, and striking vocals provided by Rebecca Vernon (backed by bandmates Sarah Pendleton and Kim Pack). I really wish we lived in a world where strings and uh, women were resoundingly normal in metal, but that is not the case! So I cherish SubRosa, and how decisively they wielded their disparate elements such that even the haters could not dismiss them as a gimmick act.First things first, Rebecca Vernon’s got an excellent voice – on the heavier songs she delivers powerful, raw vocals, especially at lower registers, without feeling out of range. She can also pull off some real beautiful and soft-spoken delivery that in no way sounds “princessy”. Such is the power of altos, and without being weird about it she’s pretty close to my own ideal voice.So in picking a new favorite band I suppose I’ve swapped metal with violins and female singers for… metal with violins and female singers. Old habits die hard. Anyways, SubRosa has an unbeatable trilogy of albums from the 2010s, which you can identify by their two-tone black and beige illustrations of haunted women. Sometimes you find an aesthetic that works and roll with it till the bitter end.The first in this lot, No Help For The Mighty Ones (2011), is the closest this band gets to straightforward bangers. There are some immediately accessible songs such as Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes and Whippoorwill, with catchy riffs and triumphant finales. Peppered throughout are some much harsher songs, as the band tries to figure out just the right mix of beauty and aggression to work with. But ultimately, it’s an album more wistful than angry, and the bittersweetness is delectable. It’s their work I find myself in the mood to listen to most often, even if that comes at the cost of the overall work not cohering as tightly as what comes after. More Constant Than The Gods (2013) is my favorite album of all time. It took two listens for it to properly sink in, but by the third I was enraptured. The songs are all apocalyptically heavy, sorrowful, and driving, and there aren’t any softer interludes like their other albums have. Shit really is More Constant! And yet each track truly stands out. There’s just six songs, coming in at a bit over an hour, and there’s not a wasted moment in there.The Usher wastes no time getting to the subject matter of the album title and artwork: death as supreme, feminine, terrifying, and inevitable. With at least four distinct sections, this song could honestly stand alone as its own suite, but here it’s just setting the stage, and my god what a flex that is. What follows is Ghosts of a Dead Empire, an unflinching reflection on colorism and colonialism in India. Doggedly heavy, it’s probably the closest SubRosa gets to straightforward doom. Cosey Mo hews closer to the songwriting style of the previous album, but even then, it’s a real step up – there’s still the bombastic resolute choruses, but the backing violins swirl in and out to add this wondrously chaotic texture to the mix. The song is a feminist response to Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel, and one that practically outmodes its source material.Then you’ve got Fat of the Ram, which coldly spells out the contradictions and suffocation of living in Utah, how piousness and cruelty go hand in hand. There’s a deep spiritual emptiness to these high halls surrounded by near-apocalyptic desert wasteland. The penultimate track, Affliction, is built off of a fascinating, stoner-y sliding guitar progression and builds up to some wonderful string work. If it is the weakest song on the album then that is a testament to the work’s strength. And No Safe Harbor…. I’m not the kind of person to go “this band saved my life” but I think this is the single song that’s done the most for me. It’s some of the most somber poetry and orchestral work I’ve ever run into, until halfway through when the flutes go nuts and a single-note riff starts crashing away in the background. It’s a song about facing down the deepest personal sorrow and letting it go – I’ve used it for terrible news and the end of relationships alike. There’s value in being down here at rock bottom, and trusting yourself to climb back up with newfound clarity and resolution afterwards. At least that’s what I’m thinking about whenever the honest-to-god doom dulcimer plays away in the closing minutes.In case you couldn’t tell from these writeups, SubRosa are pretty damn well-read, and being based out of Salt Lake City strongly colors their work. This all comes to a head in their final album, For This We Fought the Battle of Ages (2016). It’s loosely based off of the book We, Yevgeny Zamyatina’s very early entry in dystopian science fiction. Once again, I read it and found it far less engaging than the album makes it out to be! So good on them for drawing the compelling stuff out. For This We Fought… is chiefly concerned with capturing protagonist D-503’s mental breakdown as he is no longer able to conform to his perfectly regimented society after learning of an outside world and an active resistance movement. It’s a very intense album, concerned with control, individualism, forbidden knowledge, and apocalypticism. There are far less slow and somber moments than before, and instead the parts where the heaviness falls out from underneath feel almost like a beast slowly dragging itself forward.This all comes at a price. Normally, I’m a staunch advocate for listening through albums from start to finish as complete works, but this one honestly suffers a bit when doing so. Black Majesty is a beautiful song, perhaps the heaviest and most complex SubRosa gets, containing a poem spoken, sung, and growled across seven minutes that really makes you feel the weight of carving a path through unyielding stone. It’s honestly best experienced in isolation – after the weight and length of the first two songs on the album, a third going even harder can lead to a bit of listener fatigue, which makes it harder to appreciate the majesty of the soundscape for what it is. But hey, at least the separation kinda fits with the album themes.The final track of For This We Fought… is the only one disconnected from the album’s source material, but it’s still very much in conversation with the themes. Written in direct response to the 2015 LDS condemnation on same-sex couples, Troubled Cells is personal. It’s about walking away from Omelas, refusing to accept the promise of salvation at anyone else’s expense. It’s bitter, noble, and accompanied by a music video exclusively casting gay kids.I don’t think a coincidence that Vernon herself walked away afterwards, dissolving the band and moving from Utah to Portland to start a new solo project. As a palate cleanser, SubRosa’s final work is an excellent unplugged live album which reveals the haunting folk underbelly to so many of these compositions. And back in the desert, the remainder of SR stayed together and reformed as The Otolith. They’re pretty good and ideally 2026 will bring some new material from them. #manifesting
Dec 19, 2025 • Subscribe
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