REVIEW: Bleached Cross - Wrath

Darkwave act BLEACHED CROSS have found their way out of the murky underbelly of Chicago, and are ready to bring their brand of mournful, industrial sonic sadness to the masses with new LP Wrath. Originating as a file-sharing collaboration between Chicago and San Diego, the band became a fully fledged live act in 2020 and has not stopped to look back since. Now they’re on the cusp of releasing the heaviest work so far in their career, blending post punk, noise rock, industrial, dark wave, goth rock, and more into an enticingly melancholic mixture.

Across ten tracks and more than half an hour, Wrath acts as an exploration of the process of grief as both psychological horror and spiritual transformation. The album’s narrative takes us through loss and guilt, death and love, and the struggles that come with all this emotion in the aftermath of tragedy. Ultimately, it describes the attempt to survive unbearable loss without being hollowed out completely. 

The band have explained the themes of the album: “Downfall and redemption of the self are themes explored over the course of ten tracks, while love’s ability to reverberate beyond this mortal coil is central to the album’s core, and the inflection point at which Bleached Cross offer us to consider how one can both come to terms with death, and heal in the shadow of loss.”   

Addressing the album as a set of individual tracks would feel like reducing them all to less than the sum of their parts. Wrath should be listened to as a whole, as a full experience that considers immensely heavy emotions and their outcomes. From the opening notes of track one, Thorn Crown, you can feel the intensity behind the music, and that never stops - whether it’s accompanied by seemingly relentless blasts of drumming, aching synth melodies, viscerally vulnerable lyricism, and everything else that you can find across the 35 minute experience of the album.Whether Torment’s more abrasive blackened sound is for you or the pure goth worship of Blood Moon is more to your taste, maybe the industrial tinge on Requiem might be the bit you love most or it’s the dusk-drenched sound of The Dark, the album will draw you in and you won’t regret it.

Inside of 40 minutes, BLEACHED CROSS have made an argument to be one of the most interesting goth and goth-adjacent bands in the current soundscape of alternative music. Able to jump all over the place sonically and never lose a very recognisable sound, every new moment of anguish brings that bittersweet thrill you’ll be aching for all over again as soon as it’s over.

Score: 8/10

Wrath will be released on 24th July 2026 via New Morality Zine.

Words: Jasmine Longhurst

Photos: Matty Gagui