REVIEW: Zeruel - Ruin;Rebirth

ZERUEL is an artist as mysterious as he is prolific. With the release of only one EP, he’s already been opening for groups like DEAFHEAVEN on their UK and EU tour alongside PORTRAYAL OF GUILT, and also shoegaze hall of fame-ers LSD AND THE SEARCH FOR GOD, whose studio discography ironically contains less tracks than the upcoming ZERUEL album this review is about. Some accounts refer to “him” as a singular artist, others refer to “them” as a band. It’s hard to know what the intended form of address is. But maybe that’s for the best - named after one of the “angels” from Neon Genesis Evangelion and with the lyrics to both projects narrating stories about a fallen angel, it almost seems as though a lack of clarity is the objective here.

Ruin;Rebirth is ZERUEL’s newest gift to the world, a significantly more conceptual venture compared to 2024’s albeit much more cohesive Awakening EP. That EP was very much an exercise in ZERUEL’s grunge and alternative metal-inspired brand of shoegaze. Ruin;Rebirth, however, shows itself to be something of a left-turn immediately - the opening track Ruin is a string-laden narration recounting the outline of the story of the fallen angel, leading straight into For An Angel Who’s Fallen. There’s a high level of ambition on display here, ditching the shoegaze aesthetic in favour of pounding drums and a string section. The only holdover from his previous work being the quiet, almost whispered vocals. That is, until the halfway mark of the song, when vocalist Braydon Hill completely lets loose, with some screamed vocals. The song later devolves into this intense stop-start feel, as the instrumentation drops out and then gets dragged back in. 

It’s a ballsy way of starting the album to anyone familiar with his work, and it only steps things up from there. What Future Awaits is unrelentingly noisy, you feel every snare hit and scream over a minute as it leads you away with an equally as unexpected ambient outro. It’s only the fourth and fifth tracks, Limbo and Archeia respectively, that feel more in keeping with his previous releases. There’s a careful approach to pacing and loud-quiet dynamics, plus the instrumentation is soaked in reverb, a hazy backdrop to the understated vocal performance - these ones are for the shoegazers.

There’s plenty more variety on here too, the mid-album interlude Rest serves as a kind of intro to Merciful, a song which feels like a slow build up to a well-deserved wall of sound in its last moments. Resurgence Befalls begins with blast beats over a repeated chord, Hill’s vocals piercing their way through the mix, the most overwhelmingly loud and merciless passage on the whole release up to this point. Vessels of Light is a gorgeous track, with a bittersweet chord progression which matches the vocals perfectly. Easily the standout of the more traditional alt rock and shoegaze blends on here, we only wish it went on for longer.

The first of the final two tracks here, A Feather Falling With Wind, effectively acts as the closer. It’s a suitable finale, an intense display of self-reflection and healing which the music conveys effortlessly, via powerful, reverberating drums, which precede a lone, desolate guitar, signalling the final wall of sound section, which aptly reaches higher and higher into the heavens as it progresses. Rebirth picks up where A Feather Falling With Wind ends, a piano melody to lead us to the end of the story, where we hear a comforting voice that has appeared at various points in this story welcoming our narrator back.

ZERUEL’s debut album is ambitious, no doubt. There’s a wide variety of sounds on here, which work in service of the central narrative - however, in spite of this, it can occasionally feel somewhat one-note. The song structures tend to follow the same patterns at various points, though tracks like For An Angel Who’s Fallen and Resurgence Befalls provide a good reprieve from this. Even with this in mind, it’s a promising debut album, and we hope that ZERUEL continue to evolve and rise to the proverbial heavens.

Score: 7/10

Ruin;Rebirth will be released on 19th June 2026 via Rise Records.

Words: Noise Leonard

Photos: Zeruel