The first time I really sank into I Write to You, My Darling Decay by A Wake in Providence—the symphonic blackened deathcore band out of Staten Island that’s been pushing the genre into increasingly operatic, apocalyptic territory—it was past midnight, headphones on, house lights off except for the glow from a lamp in the corner. One of those nights where everything feels vaguely unreal already. I put the album on expecting something huge and punishing. I wasn’t prepared for how diseased it felt. How alive.

By the time “Mournful Benediction” hit, I remember just sitting there thinking, what the hell is this thing doing to me?

A lot of bands use orchestration like decoration, but what got under my skin here was how predatory it sounded. The choirs didn’t feel triumphant. They felt accusatory. The strings didn’t swell—they writhed. I kept thinking of old body horror films I grew up obsessing over, those moments where flesh starts betraying itself. That same sick fascination runs through this record.

And maybe that’s why it hit me the way it did.

Years ago, I was visiting a friend who worked in a machine shop, and I spent a night hanging around while he finished a shift. Hours of grinding metal, hydraulic screams, oil in the air, heat coming off the machinery like breath. I remember being unnerved by how organic the whole place felt despite being all steel and mechanism—like the machines had their own pulse. Listening to this album brought that memory back in a rush. The guitars have that same quality. Not riffing so much as grinding. Chewing. Like rusted gears biting into bone.

That’s where this album lives for me.

The vocals especially feel less like performance and more like possession. They mutate constantly. Snarl, convulse, split open. At times it sounds like several voices clawing through the same wound. I’ve heard plenty of extreme vocalists go monstrous; this feels different. More unstable.

And I love that instability.

When the title track unfolded, I stopped hearing songs and started hearing architecture. That sounds absurd, maybe, but it’s true. The album doesn’t progress in neat tracks to me—it expands, room by room, like some collapsing cathedral built out of grief and rot. I hear traces of Septicflesh and Dimmu Borgir in there, but A Wake in Providence feel far less imperial, far more diseased. Less apocalypse from above, more transformation from within.

And that distinction matters.

Because I don’t hear this record as nihilistic. I hear obsession—decay as mutation, corruption as becoming. There’s something strangely beautiful in how often the album seems to suggest destruction isn’t an ending but a grotesque form of evolution.

Sure, it’s excessive. It’s almost absurdly maximalist. Sometimes it threatens to collapse under the weight of its own grandeur. But honestly, that’s part of why I trust it. It reaches too far. It overcommits. It mutates in public. So many heavy records want to crush you. This one felt like it wanted to absorb you. That’s rarer.

When I come back to I Write to You, My Darling Decay, I don’t return for brutality alone. I return for that sensation I had at two in the morning—that feeling some hidden machinery had come alive in the walls. That I was hearing something sacred and malformed at once.

Some albums hit. Some linger. This one infects.

And when the final notes collapse into silence, it doesn’t feel like resolution so much as contamination left humming under the skin. Decay here doesn’t end—it propagates. I Write to You, My Darling Decay is available through Unique Leader Records Bandcamp—digital, CD, and limited vinyl editions (when in stock).

As always, remember: celluloid fades. Dissonance remains.