Anyone who’s brushed against James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses has almost certainly encountered the phrase “remorse of conscience” before. A pivotal theme of the novel, remorse of conscience refers to more than mere guilt over a perceived ethical failure but the misery inflicted by it, its weight and torment. In the days leading up to receiving Remorse of Conscience, the independent debut from New Hampshire’s genre-blending Agenbite Misery, a record informed by Ulysses and “steeped in grief, alienation and the search for meaning in modern life,” I was experiencing that eponymous turmoil myself. Why?1 Because Agenbite Misery, along with bassist Cam Netland and drummer/primary vocalist Adam Richards, is the creative baby of guitarist/synth guy Sam Graff, AMG’s very own Samguineous Maximus. Promising as fair and impartial a review as I could muster to both my colleague and my merciless taskmasters, one terrifying question bit at me relentlessly between accepting the task and receiving the promo: “What if it sucks?”2
Among the myriad sub-genres influencing Remorse of Conscience, Agenbite Misery’s bread and butter is a complementary fusion of sludge and black metal. Songs like “Bellwether and Swine” and “Mnesterophonia” swing between second-wave blackened intensity and a washing of Acid Bath grime, while “Telemachean Echoes” wrecks house through hardcore-flexing sludge brutality and “Circe” bestows an atmospheric dreariness similar to Hexrot. This works: Agenbite Misery’s sludge influence adds weight to their blackened riffing while their black metal influence helps keep their sludge from plodding too long. Elsewhere, Agenbite Misery throw their weight around in “Cascara Sagrada” with Portalesque disso-death depravity, engage in melancholic electronic atmospherics on “The Twice-Charred Paths of Musing Disciples” and get downright danceable Crippling Alcoholism-style on the post-rock, synth-heavy “Whatness of Allhorse,” which sounds like something Blade would kill a roomful of vampires to. Remorse of Conscience rarely sits still, and with Agenbite Misery’s expert songwriting everything they try comes together cohesively.
Remorse of Conscience by Agenbite Misery
Balance is the key to Agenbite Misery and Remorse of Conscience’s success. Every song is crafted with superb dynamism, whether it be in “Circe”‘s shifting speeds, “Mnesterophonia”‘s oscillating sense of airiness and crushing oppression or “Whatness of Allhorse”‘s gradual escalation of heaviness. Vocally, Agenbite Misery mix it up between the three bandmates with shrieks, roars, squeals (“Bellwether and Swine”), barks (“Telemachean Echoes”) and (competently performed!) spoken-word passages (“A Charitable View of Temporary Sanity,” “Whatness of Allhorse”), suiting whatever mood the songs demand. The pinnacle of Remorse of Conscience’s balancing act is “A Charitable View of Temporary Sanity,” which across its over-thirteen-minute runtime swings from thoughtful, quiet bass arpeggios against sparse guitar notes to titanic doom riffs, from funeral dirge tempos to double-time death marches. Sometimes quietly disturbing, sometimes manically depressive, variety in style and approach keeps Remorse of Conscience from ever being boring.
Remorse of Conscience remains compelling through its entirety because of Agenbite Misery’s greatest balancing act: blending immediacy within slow-burn constructions. Despite the thematic density derived from its source material, Remorse of Conscience opens with a simple rager in “Telemachean Echoes” and loads “Whatness of Allhorse” and “Circe” with hooky synth and guitar leads respectively, affording the album casual listening appeal. Then there are Agenbite Misery’s epics in “A Charitable View of Temporary Sanity” and “Mnesterophonia,” which eschew conventional song structure for slow, Isis-like post-metal waves and sludgy, noise-rock menace, easy to become lost in as a listener. Both modes keep the pacing of Remorse of Conscience fresh, and the mix of short songs (“Telemachean Echoes,” “The Twice-Charred Paths of Musing Disciples”) with longform ones further dispels any threat of monotony creeping in. Both song-wise and album-wide, Remorse of Conscience is not only a rich, thoughtful exploration of guilt and turmoil but a really, really fun record, too.
“What if it sucks?” What if, indeed. Having spent so much time with this record, my old concern of winding up disliking Remorse of Conscience was replaced with the new anxiety over whether I’d gas up Agenbite Misery and Sam too much and come off as committing inter-AMG favoritism. To combat that fear: “Whatness of Allhorse” and “Mnesterophonia” get a bit long in the tooth,3 “Bellwether and Swine” ends a bit anticlimactically and the drum kicks and snares could be much punchier overall. But this is water under the bridge for a great album defined by adventurous songcraft and deep atmospheres. Even if you’ve never read a word of Joyce’s Ulysses, Agenbite Misery and Remorse of Conscience is worth the effort. It’s a lot easier to finish than Ulysses, at the very least.
Rating: Great4
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps MP3
Label: Independent
Websites: agenbitemisery.com | agenbitemisery.bandcamp.com | ampwall.com/a/agenbitemisery
Releases Worldwide: February 6th, 2026
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