Exclusive Album Stream: Agenbite Misery’s Remorse of Conscience
Stately and plump, of course.
On February 6–just in time for the first Bandcamp Friday of 2026!–New Hampshire’s Agenbite Misery will release their first full-length Remorse of Conscience. Based entirely on James Joyce’s Ulysses, itself celebrating its 104th birthday this week, the trio’s work is one of translation, revision, conversion, remediation, and reimagining. Each song corresponds to a chapter from Ulysses, their titles bearing important literary allusions (“Circe”) as well as references to Joyce’s most famous lines (“Whatness of Allhorse”). The track list alone is a testament to Joyce’s allusive and varied maddening brilliance. That it took Agenbite Misery a year to write the album and another to record it is a testament to what pursuing this kind of project both entails and produces. There is thought. There is time. (So much time.) There is effort. There is work. Let Remorse of Conscience act as antidote to a frictionless world, a world in which, as Neil Postman writes, “what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.” Whether you think Postman means convenient to mean comfortable, easy, available, popular, quick, or simple, this is not the world of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, or Agenbite Misery themselves.
To take on Ulysses as the purview and influence of your album is to take on the modernist project. When Buck Mulligan intones, bowl aloft, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” this is a moment, claims Christopher Butler following Hugh Kenner, of “a quotation of a quotation of a quotation,” representing the “presence of underlying conceptual or formal structures” that have both literary depthlessness and immediate political purport. “Originally a Hebrew cry for help amid persecution,” this Latin intonation invites us into a world where endlessly trailing allusions and serious socio-political conflict are imbricated. As the band says,
Remorse of Conscience is our attempt to translate the grandeur and nuance of Joyce’s Ulysses into aural form. It’s an experimental metal odyssey across genres and sounds, with each track adapting a different chapter from the literary epic. It captures the emotional weight and absurdity of living a modern existence.
Sonically, Agenbite Misery layer together various genres and subgenres, with riffs at times calling to mind exact bands, albums, songs. Other times, these moment or riffs are satisfyingly, deliciously coy, like a quote or reference on the tip of your tongue you can’t quite speak into existence. Even when you’re sure that this riff must surely be a nod to a particular artist, there is still a hesitance, borne from Joyce’s own ever-playful and oft-oblique use of literature and mythology to tell the story of one day in one man’s life. There is a deep satisfaction in hearing the Mastodon of Lifesblood in the opening moments of “Cascara Sagrada,” but the spindly notes interspersing that mighty Lifesblood-ian riff is just askew enough to make you rethink what you’ve just heard or hear what you’ve heard before anew. The modernist project, if we wanted to use these terms, was one where authors, musicians, painters, and artists alike demystified and remystified their ever-shifting worlds in equal measure. Modernity, as we might understand it, is about “the stresses and strains brought about within [the early twentieth century] by the loss of belief in religion, the rise of our dependence on science and technology, the expansion of markets and the commodification brought about by capitalism, the growth of mass culture and its influence, the invasion of bureaucracy into private life, and changing beliefs about relationships between the sexes.” And this is to say nothing of war, all the war. Realism tried, in its own way in the nineteenth century, to deal with their own iterations of these stresses and strains. Modernism needed to deviate. And so too does Agenbite Misery. Deviate, that is.
Ripping opener “Telemachean Echoes,” invoking Homer, invoking Shakespeare, invoking Dedalus, is a short blast of Havoc Records-era grind/powerviolence. It doesn’t sound like anything else, really, on the album. Crucial Unit or even DS13 are haunting the track like a vengeful ghost. The soft dark ambience of “The Twice-Charred Paths of Musing Disciples” returns you to the emotional weightiness of the quiet beginnings of “A Charitable View of Temporary Sanity.” The aforementioned “Whatness of Allhorse” is marching and industrial, calling to mind as much the pulsive beats of 80s Ministry as the gothic stargazing of late-90s Samael. “Bellwether and Swine” has all the towering power of the heaviest sludge bands of the 2010s, so take your pick. “Circe” harbours on post-black, hints of dissonance and a general sense of melodrama intertwining to create something beguiling, sexy, and dark. Closer “Mnesterophonia” crawls along with a Melvins-esque bass line, unfolding over 14 minutes, encompassing all the sounds that have come before it, taking us to the novel’s end and Molly Bloom thinking through the loves, flings, flirtations, liaisons of her life. One of the great difficulties of translating stream-of-consciousness literature into structured music is avoiding the pitfalls of mess, of slapdash, of unwieldy improvisation and themeless meandering. To be sure, “Mnesterophonia” is challenging, a kind of hostile drone-ambient takeover at albums’ end, but it feels so narratively fitting that to close in any other way would leave the listener wanting.
There’s so much more to say. So much to read. So much more to learn. So much more to hear. Start with this exclusive early stream.
Remorse of Conscience arrives Friday February 6th.
CD digipacks, signed or unsigned, are available
along with a digital copy. Shirts, too!
