Back in 2012 or 2013, I discovered the band Pinkly Smooth and was instantly hooked. It was a side project of James "The Rev" Sullivan and Synyster Gates of Avenged Sevenfold, recording the EP Unfortunate Snort after Sevenfold's first album, and playing a few shows as well. It's fantastically weird avant-garde metal featuring Jimmy on piano, drums, and vocals (I always adored his vocals), although I wasn't aware of the term avant-garde at the time. Not until 2013 when I searched "experimental metal music" on YouTube and found this video.
Again, I was instantly hooked from the first few notes. Featured in this wonderful Windows Movie Maker video are several progressive/avant-garde metal bands, including several I still love like Yakuza, Portal, Ved Buens Ende..., Sigh, and most importantly today (and in my life): maudlin of the Well. maudlin is also what you hear at the very start with those harmonics (The Blue Ghost / Shedding Qliphoth), and later on in their actual feature with a jazzy passage into death metal The Ferryman. Both of these clean and beautiful passages blew me away, and I immediately wrote down all the bands I mentioned, with maudlin up at the top, in a note on Microsoft OneNote on my Windows Phone (RIP Windows Phone) to have my dad get for me.
That day truly changed my life. I grew up with some pretty good music, originally getting into metal with DragonForce and soon after Iron Maiden, with Avenged Sevenfold shortly after that. Looking back, Sevenfold truly kickstarted my interest in the experimental with their fusions of genres on City of Evil and their self-titled album, but Pinkly Smooth really got me in the door to progressive music and maudlin sealed the deal. maudlin fully showed me what music could be - free of the norms of typical music, through-composed, belnding genres and textures, and just generally being a totally different experience as it feels almost like contemporary chamber music.
Of course, I'd soon learn after going through maudlin's discography that I was only just getting started. In 2003, the band shifted and morphed into Kayo Dot and released their new debut album Choirs of the Eye. This album once again redefined music for me, leaning further into chamber music and ditching riffs and the somewhat familiar death metal styles that maudlin explored. I want to do a whole post on that album sometime as it's truly a masterpiece in every sense of the word to me.
Howver, getting back to maudlin of the Well, I consider everything they've done to be masterpieces as well. They only have four full albums, and as the years have gone on, some demos have surfaced and been released on Bandcamp. maudlin's debut My Fruit Psychobells... a Seed Combustible from 1999 is a bit rough around the edges, though us fans love this and its sense of atmosphere and mystery is unmatched. This was followed by Bath and Leaving Your Body Map in 2001, two sister albums that really are one complete package to me, which are the defining works of maudlin. They're progressive death metal, with some of the typical intricate time signatures and rhythms that you'd expect of prog (though fairly tame here), though mostly being defined for their use of softer parts, with an almost jazz sounding influence (although this isn't the case, as mentioned by leader of the band Toby Driver; maudlin is fully composed) and a focus on more classical instruments - double bass and other strings, trumpet, clarinet, fulte, etc. The band broke up after Bath/LYBM to form Kayo Dot, but did come back in 2008 with Part the Second as their final full-length release. This album was crowd funded before online crowd funding was even a thing, and it was originally released digitally for free at maudlinofthewell.net, which is a beautiful time capsule of a website. This album used old demos from before Psychobells, but was still a big shift in sound, hardly crossing into metal at all and diving much deeper into chamber and rock. I absolutely love this one. All of these explore many themes, with the most famous being dreams and astral projection, with some songs quite literally having been written in dreams (along with a few from Kayo Dot).
Since Part the Second's release in 2009, things have been mostly quiet. Kayo Dot continued on, shapeshifting and morphing with every album, and changing lineups constantly, until 2021 with the announcement and release of Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike. This album was special as it was the reunion of the original three members Toby Driver (who's at the core of both projects, writing most of everything), Jason Byron (who's been with the band the whole time, contributing lyrics for most releases), and Greg Massi, the original guitarist from before Psychobells and on every maudlin release. However, with all three being back on the same release finally and 2021 being maudlin's anniversary, Moss Grew honored maudlin and explored some similar ideas. It was this release that got my hopes and many other fans' hopes up for some sort of reunion. This was only strengthened in 2023 when they celebrated Choirs' anniversary with two full-album shows in Philadelphia, with Byron joining the band on stage to do vocals for night one's first encore song The Black Stone (his only appearance post-maudlin on a record doing vocals until the most recent album in 2025), getting my hopes up even more for new maudlin seeing his involvement on stage again.
It took a few years, but we finally got what I was hoping for. 2025 brought Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason, an album returning to Choirs of the Eye spirtiually, not musically. But it included Byron on vocals on an album once again. And soon after that, an announcement: maudlin of the Well is coming back. And that is why I wanted to write about maudlin right now. This band literally changed my outlook on music, and we're finally getting new material and more through a new Kickstarter campaign.
I strongly encourage you to check out their campaign. It details the history of the band, and of course talks about what's to come. It includes a video that was posted to YouTube years ago trying to finally solve a puzzle that linked Bath and Leaving Your Body Map that went unsolved for decades. It also includes some of the rewards for backing the album, which besides the usual vinyl copies and CDs includes an archive of relics from the old albums - notes, lyrics, sketches, artwork, rough mix CDs, and lots more - which will be given out to backers of the relic tiers. I myself backed the first relic tier, hoping to grab one of the example artifacts: sketches of the Bath/LYBM sigils, which are tattooed on my forearm as my first ever tattoo. It would be so awesome to own some of the original rough skecthes for these sigils.
We destroyed the original $35,000 goal in two hours on launch day, and are now at $66,472 with fifteen days remaining. The next stretch goal is at $80,000, a fair bit away, but I'm hoping they'll reach it - this goal is to expand the minigame that's being included with an add-on tier, developed by Terran Olson (piano, woodwinds) with writing by Jason and music by Toby. I'm very excited to see what they come up with, as its main focus is to expand on the album. Terran works in game development, so it should be a really cool extra. I'm of course still hoping for a tour eventually, or at least a show or two - I will do everything in my power to see maudlin of the Well live.
As a fan of the band, it's truly an amazingly exciting time with so many possibilites. Please do yourself a favor and listen to their old material (Bath/LYBM mainly) and consider pledging some money to assist the cause, and spread the word!
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