Premiere: BREATHS Faces Poetic Doom With New Album, Death Can Wait

War is all around us, even if it feels like it’s happening a world away. As the Earth reels from one bombardment and braces for the next, it’s hard not to ask: how much more can this planet endure? Even if we manage to look past these armed conflicts–a convenient goal for genocidal regimes hoping the world forgets–we’re still faced with a world in slow, agonizing collapse. Ecosystems are unraveling, weather systems are breaking down, and temperatures keep rising, all while humanity clings to destructive habits, each one a soldier in an unrelenting war against nature itself.

So who, in this scenario, is the frog in the proverbial pot? Is it us, soaking in our comforts, distracted by convenience and willful ignorance as we turn up the heat on our demise? Or is it the Earth itself, once teeming with life, now simmering under the strain of human excess; too tolerant for too long, allowing our scorch marks to settle in its skin until the final boil breaks it apart? Either way, the water is rising, and neither party seems ready to leave. Trying to interpret nature’s intentions in such an extreme circumstance may be futile, but when it comes to humanity, there’s no mystery. We know exactly what’s happening.

People continue to stoke the fires of propaganda, whether by design or delusion, while coastlines erode and once-reliable seasons twist into erratic, unpredictable bursts. Scientists, activists, and ordinary observers ring the alarm with everything from hard data to lived experience, trying to shake the masses from their stupor. And yet, even if a slim majority acknowledges the truth, it’s not enough to change our trajectory. The real tragedy is that there’s no simple escape, no instinctual leap to safety. Unlike the frog, we can’t just jump out. We have to find a way to turn the temperature down from within the pot, even as the steam thickens, the fever accelerates, and the voice of reason drowns beneath the hiss of a world nearing its boil.

This tension between bleak inevitability and rallying action lies at the tortured core of Death Can Wait, the new record from heavy experimental project BREATHS. Blending a litany of sub-genres together–progressive, post, and experimental variations of metal, hardcore, and shoegaze–the record uses its immersive fusion of textures to create a compelling listen that will chill people with its realistic horror. Set for release on Friday, June 27, it’s another austere release in the BREATHS canon that provides a sobering reflection of humanity’s ongoing collapse, both environmental and moral. Today, The Auricular is proud to premiere this new album with an exclusive stream below, accompanied by an in-depth exploration of its precise and haunting layers.

 

Humanity has a tendency to reshape natural phenomena into bite-sized, romanticized versions of themselves: speeding up whale “songs” so we can hear them within the human auditory band, re-colorizing cosmic gas and dust into vivid images fit for posters and lock screens, even fetishizing fossilized remains while extinction continues unchecked around us. Death Can Wait accomplishes something similar but with none of the softness or aesthetic polish. Instead, it distills centuries of global suffering and ecological collapse into dense, unflinching tracks that remain listenable, though far from easy. It’s the inverse of romanticization. A confrontation rather than a comfort.

“Writhing in pain\ Agony unending\ We cling to our ways\ Despite all the warnings,” BREATHS declares in the harrowing opener “Now We Prey,” following vivid depictions of cities and skies consumed by flame. Doomsday imagery fills the track, but unlike traditional apocalyptic narratives, there’s no redemption waiting in the heavens. Only scorched ruin remains, divine and earthly alike, squandered by our own careless hands. As the album unfolds, the diagnosis becomes explicit: humanity is not just complicit, but the disease itself, “a cancer to Earth” per a later song, with no cure in sight. This isn’t a warning. It’s a final assessment. End stage.

Still, Death Can Wait finds room to move beyond pure desolation. In “The Void,” it extends a glimmer of hope: raw, fragile, and deeply felt. “I’d love to think that my children will have\ Beauty to get them through this life,” BREATHS pleads with aching sincerity, delivered with pause to reflect the weight of uncertainty. It’s a desperate wish, held tightly in the face of overwhelming collapse. That hope flickers again in “Our Rapture,” where the call to “create our rapture” feels defiant. But even here, it’s clear that salvation comes at a cost: “We’ll break our necks just to hold our heads up high,” a lyric that exposes the brutal toll of trying to rise over the ruin.

“Sometimes persistence is not enough,” the lyrics admit in the allegorical track “The Tower,” a stark admission that echoes a truth long understood but rarely voiced within climate activism. Determination alone can’t reverse what’s already been set in motion. It’s just one of many uncomfortable questions BREATHS raises throughout the record, including the haunting reflection, “What would be waiting for me at the end?” Despite the overwhelming bleakness, these questions aren’t presented as inevitabilities but as calls for reflection, moments demanding deep scrutiny even as the darkness grows. It’s this fragile strand of hope that gives Death Can Wait its devastating impact. The album doesn’t linger solely in collapse; it probes what might still be salvaged, physically and spiritually. While holding humanity accountable with relentless honesty, it simultaneously clings to the possibility of a different path forward. Not because we currently deserve it… but because maybe, someday, someone will.

Death Can Wait is the fifth full-length album from BREATHS, following 2021’s Lined In Silver, 2022’s Though Life Has.., 2023’s Floruit, and 2024’s breaths. Parallel to this main body of work, BREATHS has also explored darker sonic territories under the Isolera moniker, releasing two dark ambient/drone records, Part I in 2022 and Part II in 2023. Across these projects, a shared sense of worldly reckoning permeates, fueled by BREATHS mastermind Jason Roberts’ activist spirit and his skill for dissolving genre boundaries into immersive, thought-provoking narratives, whether conveyed through haunting instrumentals or evocative lyrical expression, each capturing a dichotomy of awareness.

The music here channels this emotional duality with remarkable clarity, particularly for something rooted in such dense, heavy sonics. The atmosphere often borders on suffocating, drenched in tension and dread, yet it’s precisely that weight that makes its moments of catharsis so powerful. Hypnotic rhythms anchor lines like “Our home is rebelling\ Meant to live in harmony\ But we’ll never know peace,” giving them an added gravity that lingers. The soundscapes navigate a fragile line between despair and potential, bleak yet malleable–suggesting that change, while distant, isn’t impossible. BREATHS’ genre-spanning approach keeps the experience dynamic and volatile, each shift in tone or texture catching the listener off guard just as they begin to find footing.

Vocally, the record is just as multifaceted. It veers from venomous growls—raw and relentless in their indictment of human destruction—to spectral, almost tender melodies that feel like fleeting moments of grace. It’s a conversation between condemnation and compassion, unflinching in its critique yet unwilling to let go of the idea that something might still be saved. Death Can Wait doesn’t soften the reality of collapse, but it refuses to concede that beauty has vanished entirely. Instead, it presents beauty as something endangered yet enduring, waiting–barely–to be remembered, reclaimed, and protected.

BREATHS reinforces these themes through the use of well-known cultural and literary touchstones. The infamous Oppenheimer quote from the Bhagavad Gita becomes the title of one track, while the album’s closer borrows its name and opening lines from Emily Dickinson’s iconic observation on mortality. Both references are intentionally subverted within the album’s larger context: Dickinson’s polite, inevitable Death is no longer a comforting guide but a force to resist, while the stark realization in the Hindu scripture becomes not a surrender to annihilation, but a grim clarity that jolts us out of complacency, an anti-defeatist awakening. In a similar vein, “The Tower” draws on mythic and narrative archetypes, blending classical and modern storytelling to reflect the endless, often futile, striving required if we truly hope to rise above collapse rather than be consumed by it.

Ultimately, Death Can Wait is poetic doom. Despair saturates every verse, fueled by scorn that hones its bleak atmosphere. It confronts us from every angle, a reckoning born of our own apathy and ignorance. Yet, through the fury, BREATHS carves out space for something more: a spark not yet extinguished by rage, a fragile hope in resistance, a promise in the possibility of change. Doom is not inevitable. At least not yet. But it will be if we continue sinking. The call is clear. Climb the tower. Refuse the carriage’s ride. Seek the cure for humanity’s cancer so we do not become destroyers of worlds. As BREATHS sings in the closing lines of “The Void,” “I’d love to think my children will have\ More than hopelessness and fear of the end,” a hope that must fuel our fight until the very last breath.

Death Can Wait is set for release on Friday, June 27, digitally as well as on vinyl and CD, which you can pre-order by clicking here. Follow BREATHS on social media to stay up-to-date on future releases and announcements.