Release Date August 7th, 2026
Format Cassette/Digital
Genre Depressive Atmospheric Black Metal
Origin United States
Flowers Of Rust is the Cleveland, Ohio project of Jake O’Brien, built as a private outlet for depressive atmospheric black metal with a cold, wounded core. The name surfaced again in November 2025 with “Crude Exhibitions Of The Soul”, first issued as a tiny hand-numbered CD run. That first appearance gave the album the aura of a half-buried document, the kind of release passed between the few people ready to dig past the safer end of the style. Apocalyptic Witchcraft now brings it back on cassette and digital formats, giving wider access to an album soaked in collapse, isolation, and stripped nerve endings.
Flowers Of Rust is not presented as a social unit or a scene product. It comes across as Jake O’Brien pulling sound from a private ruin, aided here by J V Green on drums and a guest guitar appearance from Thorn Blackfyre on “Crude Exhibitions Of The Soul”. The links to Burial Oath, Goatchamber, Black Altar, Vástígr, Cringe, and Trenchgoat add useful background, since this album sits in a space where raw metal, despair, and atmosphere need more than a thin private-project buzz to survive. The project’s value is in its narrow emotional language, no charm, no daylight, no attempt to make misery pretty.
“Crude Exhibitions Of The Soul” was mixed and mastered by Thom Tadsen, with new artwork prepared for this Apocalyptic Witchcraft edition. The sound is raw, cold, and close enough to the bone to make the safer corners of the genre seem useless. The drums have a human pulse, not a grid-locked machine march, and the guitars cut in long grey lines, sometimes frantic, sometimes half-dead. The vocals are torn and bitter, placed in the mix as another wound, not as a tidy focal point.
The better passages arrive when the riffs open into bleak melody and the rhythm section pulls the music downward with real drag. “Mother Atrophy” and “Brave New Corpse” leave the deepest marks, with “Sour Mercy” and “Bright Violence” adding colder, jagged turns across the same terrain. The title track has a choking, organic shape, and “Driftwood” closes the album with a numb, drained aftertaste. There is enough variation in tempo and guitar texture to stop the album from sinking into total monotony, though the emotional palette remains narrow by design.
The despair is real, and the guitar work has enough poisonous melody to pull the ear back when the pacing starts to sag. A few transitions blur together, and some ideas could have been cut shorter for a harder wound. The cassette format should serve this material, since the album’s cold scrape and damaged ambience do not need luxury packaging or studio shine. This is music for grey days, closed curtains, and the bad part of the night, made with a lot of pain and a good amount of craft. As it stands, Flowers Of Rust has made a grim, damaged, respectable album that scratches deep enough to matter, with limitations left in plain view. It has substance, ache, and a bleak pulse, plus enough flaws to keep it out of the top tier.
|7.0
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