Iggor Cavalera / Shane Embury – Neon Gods / Own Your Darkness (2025; Cold Spring Records) – Avant Music News

Industrial drone metal is alive and well on this split release from Iggor Cavalera (Sepultura and others) and Shane Embury (Napalm Death and others). Both Cavalera and Embury are from the more extreme end of the metal genre, but here they provide a pair of tracks that are better described as experimental ambient / electronic with dark overtones.

Cavalera’s 19-minute Neon Gods builds upon subtle low-end pulsations with wailing foreground tones and undulating synths. The piece is slow-paced, gradually evolving into fluttering and glitchy electronics integrated with noise walls. Crafted static combines with windswept soundscapes until, in the latter half of the track, Cavalera reduces the intensity to quiet oscillations. But this moment of relative piece is short lived as Neon Gods ends with more noise walls that crumble into static.

Embury comes out of the gates on Own Your Darkness with shadowy, tenebrous drones. He creates his own windswept soundscapes and adds an emergency siren for tension. An ominous two-note pattern ramps up the unease through the rest of the track’s 13 minutes.

Together, Neon Gods / Own Your Darkness create an atmosphere of relentlessness and unrest. Their layered, distorted sounds intensify over time yet give way to moments of fleeting calm. These deep, shadowy tonalities interspersed with spectral electronics only amplify the listener’s disorientation.