MetalPost-rock
The Keening release “Devotion” on 16 October through Relapse Records, dedicated to Rebecca Vernon’s father, who died in May 2025.
“Metal is beginning to share more vulnerable things, more confessional things,” Vernon says. “Metal has almost become a safe place to talk about those things.”
It is the second album by the project Vernon put together after SubRosa, and it comes three years after “Little Bird”. There are seven tracks and the first four form a suite: “Devotion I – Golden Thread”, “Devotion II – Fitful Sleep”, “Devotion III – The King” and “Devotion IV – O Mother”. The other three are “A Little Bit Of Blood”, “Time Travel” and “The Murder Of Anna Brown”.
The first single was “A Little Bit Of Blood”, with a video, on 10 September. The second is the suite’s third movement, which she describes as the heaviest track on the record and where the spoken-sung delivery sounds like SubRosa again; she says what comes next will go further that way. Vernon plays drums, guitar, piano, organ and hammered dulcimer on it as well as singing, and the label places it between slow-burning post-rock, folk, goth and doom.
The album was recorded in April 2022 at Hallowed Halls in Portland, produced by Billy Anderson and Nathan Carson, three years before that death: the dedication came after the record.
Text by Roger Estivill