Everyone remembers their first Thou record, right? No? Just me? Well I do. Technically the first Thou record I heard was Summit, earlier on in the 2010s, and which remains one of my all-time favorite metal records. But that wasn’t the first one I bought. That would be Heathen, the album that helped me understand just how great Thou is as a band and, beyond that, just how deep the well goes in their catalog. And this is one of the proper albums—beyond that there’s a bunch of EPs, splits, collabs, 7-inches. Their catalog is pretty massive. Here’s a primer if you want to know more.
But Heathen drew me in closer in large part because it’s not the kind of metal record that you listen to once and know all the hooks. If there are hooks to speak of. There are melodies, certainly, and with the patience to get through its 70 or so minutes, you’re rewarded with something awe-inspiring. Truly, this is an epic record, and tracks like “Free Will” and “Immorality Dictates” suggest that there’s so much more to what a metal record can be other than riffs. (And for the “but the riffs” bros, Thou are also outspoken in being antifascist, so that’s a big one for me. No more fascists in metal please.) The thing is, they don’t seem like a metal band a lot of the time—they sound like a doom metal or sludge metal band in their grandest moments, but they more or less come from a DIY hardcore background, and the fact that they have all these various pieces in their catalog kind of speaks to that. (A lot of their releases have a similar aesthetic of woodcut artwork, too, which is pretty neat.) They also have a tendency to play whatever the hell they feel like live, too. I’m not sure if they map out their setlists, but I’ve seen them twice and both were radically different experiences. One took place after a party on a boat (we hauled ass from the pier to the club), and I only caught two songs of their set (which was basically half the set): “Into the Marshlands” and a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void.” Pretty rad regardless.
You might see this and think “that’s not what I remember the cover of Heathen looking like…” And it’s a different version of it—there’s at least three different covers of this album, as it turns out. The Vendetta pressing (EU) has different artwork than the Bandcamp version and the Gilead release. That’s true of a lot of their records. Once I get to Summit in a few hundred posts, you’ll see that it’s not the version with the murky looking factory on the cover. They do this a lot. It’s confusing, but it does seem that aesthetics are a major part of what they do, and the art is always pretty cool, regardless.
I picked this up at the San Diego Metal Record Swap in 2017 after I was granted permission to start a metal night (which only lasted four months, since I realized doing stuff on Mondays is…tough). Naturally I needed fodder to fill my playlists, and this one called to me. Although I realized that even at a metal night, all of the tracks on this record are super long so I’d have to choose carefully. (Maybe “Into the Marshlands,” which I think I did play…) But this isn’t a record you put on for people drinking beer on a Monday night. It’s a record you put on at home, and you let it consume you.
Rating: 9.3
Sound Quality: Great
1000 Times Jeff 
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