I am not a patient man. Ask anyone who has the pleasure of knowing me and they will tell you that. It took me about four years to watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy because I get bored easily and wander off to do something else. My attention span clocks in at about twenty minutes on a single thing, and that’s me being generous. Which is why I like albums. Albums have songs. Songs end. Another one begins. Motion. Change. Forward momentum. It’s also why I’ve historically despised prog. Endless self-indulgent noodling does nothing for me except test my will to live.
So when Caged Bastard reached out and asked me to review his latest album, Cold, Cruel, you can imagine my reaction when I clicked through to Bandcamp and discovered it was one single track running just shy of thirty-seven minutes.
That face you’re picturing? Yes. That one.
What I was not prepared for was the look that followed: genuine disbelief. Not only did I listen to it, I didn’t turn it off. I didn’t skip ahead. I didn’t wander around my office aimlessly. I sat there, locked in, absorbing the whole damned thing like I was under some kind of spell. Cold, Cruel had me by the throat, and I liked it.
Which immediately presents a problem. How do you review a single thirty-seven minute piece of music that refuses to behave like anything you recognise?
The honest answer is that you don’t approach it like an album. You approach it like an environment. A place you’re dragged into and forced to navigate without a map. Cold, Cruel isn’t interested in verse/chorus structures, climactic payoffs, or comforting signposts. It mutates. It seeps. It corrodes.
Musically, this thing is a chimera. Noise, metal, electronics, industrial abrasion, moments that feel almost ritualistic, others that sound like machinery arguing with itself. At times the vocals don’t even register as human. There are sections where Caged Bastard sounds less like a person and more like something assembled from malfunctioning hardware and hatred, barking transmissions from inside a broken shell. It shouldn’t work. And yet it absolutely does.
What makes Cold, Cruel so compelling is its sense of control. Everything feels intentional, every escalation earned. The track breathes, contracts, expands, suffocates you, then pulls back just enough to make you realise how deep in you actually are. There are stretches where the sound design feels actively hostile, grinding and oppressive, and others where a strange, bleak beauty surfaces through the filth. Not comfort. Never comfort. But clarity.
Despite its length, it never drags. That alone is borderline miraculous given my well-documented intolerance for anything that overstays its welcome. Instead, the time becomes irrelevant. Minutes stop mattering. You stop waiting for it to end and start wondering what shape it’s going to take next.
Genre tags are useless here. You could hack this thing apart with a chainsaw and still not be able to neatly categorise the remains. Cold, Cruel exists outside of easy definitions, and that’s its greatest strength. It doesn’t ask to be liked. It doesn’t care if you’re comfortable. It simply exists, unyielding and uncompromising.
I went in expecting to endure it. I came out respecting the hell out of it.
Against all odds, Caged Bastard made a thirty-seven minute single-track album that held the attention of a man who can’t sit still for half an hour. That alone deserves recognition. The fact that it’s also dark, unsettling, and genuinely original makes Cold, Cruel something far rarer: a risk that paid off.
BLACK METAL ARCHIVES VERDICT: A single 37-minute track that shouldn’t hold your attention — but absolutely does. Cold, Cruel is hostile, strange, and completely uncompromising, dragging you through noise, metal, and madness without blinking.
