Metal
RidingEasy Records · 25 September 2026
“Ruin” runs 6:56 and it’s where KOVA finally lets go. Deathchant strip distortion out instead of piling it on, the groove picks up, Thomas J. Lemieux hollers like a preacher coming apart and the guitar climbs into a long solo; then the tempo drops and the track ends in a dreamy passage of guitars that wrap around you. It’s the sixth of nine and the first moment the album stops resisting: KOVA is named for a dead friend, Davey Kova, and until here it had not admitted as much.
The opening stretch goes another way. “Enemy” (3:50) comes in with twin guitar runs that owe plenty to Thin Lizzy over a blizzard of riffing, and when the solo catches fire and the band eases the tempo the track really takes off. “Funeral Pyre” (3:47) is the nastiest of the first four, with Lemieux bellowing an inch from your face and another bone-shaking solo to close; ghostly voices are left at the end, signalling where the second half is headed.
It’s the fourth album from the Los Angeles band, after Deathchant (2019), Waste (2021) and Thrones (2023). Lemieux plays guitar, keys and bass as well as singing, and he produced it himself before sending it to Zach Weeks to mix at God City, Kurt Ballou’s studio. He’s joined by Doug Stuckey on guitar and vocals, Quinn-George Camacho on bass and Nick McDonnell on drums.
The last three tracks run together and they’re the best part of the record. “KOVA/CRAWL” (5:05) starts as an acoustic ballad with a hint of country rock and then gets kicked into gear; “Forgiveness” (4:27) has Lemieux singing as tenderly as that voice will let him, punctuating every line with a “Goddamn!”; and “Requiem” closes in 1:45 on choral voices and a sustained hum.
It’s a mixing decision, and it is there from the second track: on “Red Sun” (3:36) Lemieux’s rasp is buried so deep you can’t make out a word of the lyric, and on a record explicitly about loss, not knowing what the singer is saying is a real loss. The shape does not help either: the first four tracks are all under four minutes and do more or less the same thing, which leaves the closing eighteen minutes carrying the album’s entire emotional weight.
Nine tracks, thirty-seven minutes, RidingEasy Records, 25 September.
Rating: 7.9/10
Text by Roger Estivill