Week of Sep 07 – Sep 13 · 2026
One hundred and eighty-three tracks and only thirty-nine artists, and the gap between those two numbers is the whole week. This was seven days of monomania: every day but the first poured almost entirely into one band, one record, or in the end one sound. He ran At The Gates three times through, took De-Loused in the Comatorium in a single sitting, read the Mars Volta album by album across two nights, then raked the whole of Mastodon and the whole of Deftones over in a night each, and closed on eighty minutes of interchangeable Swedish crust. Nobody here is being sampled. He picks one thing and stays inside it until there is nothing left of it to hear.
The same week as numbers
| Day | Tracks | First play | Last play | Mean heaviness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 4 | 13:31 | 13:41 | 5.5 |
| Tuesday | 56 | 18:06 | 01:24 | 7.4 |
| Wednesday | 13 | 21:48 | 23:19 | 5.8 |
| Thursday | 23 | 17:58 | 23:13 | 6.3 |
| Friday | 30 | 09:37 | 01:23 | 6.9 |
| Saturday | 37 | 10:51 | 01:17 | 6.1 |
| Sunday | 20 | 21:41 | 23:02 | 8.1 |
The Arc
The week opens on almost nothing: four coldwave tracks on Monday afternoon and then silence, a door opened and shut. Everything after it is the opposite of that hesitation. From Tuesday on the days lock onto their subjects and will not let go, and the immersions only deepen as the week runs, two whole records on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, a whole partnership across Thursday, an entire discography on Friday and another on Saturday. It ends heaviest of all on Sunday, the crust hour, the most concentrated day of the seven.
The Map
The center of gravity is split between two countries. America supplies the long immersions, the sludge and alt-metal and prog of Mastodon, Deftones, the Mars Volta and Antemasque. Sweden supplies the sheer volume, At The Gates alone accounting for a quarter of everything played, and behind them the Swedish crust that takes over Sunday. England sits at the edges, Fields of the Nephilim's gothic rock and, on Saturday morning, two forgotten acid-folk singers played alone before the noise arrived.
The Subjects
Under the range of sound the same few subjects keep returning: death at cosmic scale in At The Gates, the coma-dream of De-Loused, the grief that runs through Mastodon's catalogue and the cover they cut for a manager who had died. Even the week's one joke, Mastodon's Stairway to Heaven, turns out to be about loss. The heaviness is not decoration; it is the man thinking, again, about endings, and choosing to sit with them at length rather than glance and move on.
The Turn
The turn is Sunday, and it turns by subtraction. All week the immersion had been a way of hearing everything a band could do, the full span of it, the tightest song and the most unspooled alike. Sunday wants the reverse, a sound with no span at all, twenty crust songs that are nearly the same song, the d-beat attack held for exactly as long as it took and no longer. A week given over to proving he could hear the whole of anything ends by choosing one narrow thing and hearing it over and over. The completist and the obsessive turn out to be the same man.
Of the 39 artists heard this week, 19 had never appeared on the record before. The longest he stayed with one name: At The Gates, 44 tracks unbroken.
Who spanned the week
What followed what
| Hushed | Low | Mid | Heavy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hushed | 1 | |||
| Low | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 |
| Mid | 3 | 47 | 11 | |
| Heavy | 3 | 9 | 95 |