The Melvins - Bad Mood Rising

Bad Mood Rising finds the Melvins doing what only the Melvins can: making 41 minutes of sludge feel like a fever dream you never want to wake from.

Released in 2022 through Amphetamine Reptile, the label that first gave these Pacific Northwest lifers a home, this six-song set reunites the band with bassist Steven McDonald and revels in the kind of restless experimentation that has kept them essential across four decades. While the grunge world they helped birth long ago calcified, King Buzzo and Dale Crover keep tunneling downward, dragging psychedelia, krautrock, and pure riff-worship into the pit with them.

The record opens with the sprawling "Mister Dog Is Totally Right," a fourteen-minute hallucination that lurches from hypnotic groove to full collapse and back. "Never Say You're Sorry" hits like a fist wrapped in fuzz, all snarling melody and Crover's cannon-fire drums, while "The Receiver And The Empire State" closes things out in a swirl of dread and lopsided beauty. Buzzo's guitar tone remains a thing of glorious, tar-thick menace throughout.

This is the Melvins refusing to coast, weird and heavy and gloriously uncooperative. For the faithful, it is another slab of proof that the band's bad mood is one of the most productive forces in underground rock.