Progressive Rock
Self-released · 10 September 2026
Cold In Cold Out opens on a declared homage. “Tongue of the Hollow” began as a drop-D tuning with the open strings held as a drone, and when Doug Harrison played it back he heard Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” in it. Rather than break the resemblance he chased it: he wrote a synth part imitating the cello on the original, and mixing engineer Sheldon Zaharko added a doubler to the lead vocal of the kind used on Cobain’s.
The guitar on it is a nylon-string Harrison picked up for twenty pounds in a charity shop in England: thin, dry, no low end, holding four minutes of song on its own. The lyric follows a bedridden man dying slowly, surrounded by cats still demanding food because they don’t understand what is happening, with someone in the flat above singing in the evening.
Slug Comparison is what Harrison does when he isn’t fronting the Canadian prog band Fen. Cold In Cold Out arrives a year after A Battle to the End Fought on the Edge of a Knife (2025), with the stated aim of shortening the gaps: the record before that one dates from 2019. He plays nearly all of it — vocals, guitars, bass and programming — leaving only the drums to Randall Stoll, who also plays in Fen.
The six tracks all move at the same pace. “To Whom Would You Answer” puts its narrator in an interrogation and “Burden of Life” leaves him in bed too flattened to eat; the words change, and the acoustic register, the tempo and the voice parked in the middle of the mix are near enough identical. “Cold In Cold Out”, five and a half minutes and the longest thing here, is the only one that allows itself a shift in dynamics and some lead guitar.
The homage at the front is so well resolved that it overshadows everything after it: none of the other five songs carries a production decision as specific as that cello synth and vocal doubler.
Six tracks, twenty-six minutes and forty-two seconds. Zaharko recorded the drums and mixed the EP, Brock McFarlane mastered it at CPS Mastering and the cover drawing is by Inkantation. It came out on 10 September with no label behind it.
Rating: 7/10
Text by Guillem Cardós