Right, cards on the table. I know Sean Decker, the man responsible for the guitars and programming behind -VOX PRO DEI- by MOG. In fact, his other project Lastat were one of the first bands I ever championed, back in the dark days of 2024 when I started doing this. Christ… has it only been two years? It feels like more.

Anyway, we developed a working friendship and Sean came onboard to run my old YouTube channel and work on the old Black Metal Archives, so when he reached out to me this morning and asked me to take a listen to his new side project, there wasn’t really a chance I was gonna hate it, now was there?

The fact that within the opening minute of the EP he drops a quote from The Metatron, played by the great Alan Rickman in Dogma, just sweetened the deal.

But friendship and kick-ass movie quotes aside, how does -VOX PRO DEI- stack up musically?

Well, I can tell you this. It isn’t an EP where you can just dip in and out of it with a song here and there.

No sir.

-VOX PRO DEI- has to be experienced as one continuous piece of music.

Have you ever had a nightmare that you don’t think you will ever wake up from?

You know the kind. Something is chasing you, but you don’t know what. It’s behind you and you are running for your life, but it feels like you are going nowhere fast. It bears down on you, getting closer and closer, and then, as your heart pounds in your chest, you wake screaming.

-VOX PRO DEI- is the soundtrack to that nightmare.

It is an industrial landscape, carved with guitars so down-tuned he must’ve dragged them out of the bowels of Hell itself. The constant jagged rhythms of the machine driving the sound forward are so violent and disturbing that it feels like being tossed inside a blender with a wiring problem.

The guitars don’t play chords as much as they beat you to death and dance around in your splattered brains.

However, horror isn’t horror if it constantly throws corpses at you, so what MOG does brilliantly is allow you small moments of reprise with choirs and piano, but even those are twisted beyond all recognition.

Yes, they are moments of light in the storm of darkness that you are living through, but they’re off.

Disconcerting.

Bent out of shape.

The kind of sounds that you hear just before the monster appears from under your bed and fucking eats you.

Sean isn’t alone in bringing this madness to life, however. This time he is joined by Kevy on vocals.

I do not know Kevy, but I assume from this vocal performance that they must be a sixteen-foot banshee demon that Sean summoned for the express purpose of torturing souls on this record.

I have heard a lot of vocal performances in my time. Some brilliant, some terrible. Some raw, some over-produced. Some unique, some carbon copies of everything that has come before.

Kevy doesn’t fall into any of these categories.

Their vocal performance on this EP is, genuinely, unlike anything I have ever heard.

Kevy’s vocals seem to live in a place where agony is not an option, but a way of life. The sheer, unadulterated anguish and bile that spills from their throat, pouring like a torrential flood of anger and poison across the tracks, is staggering.

It is both terrifying and beautiful in the same breath. It is the fucking sublime, and maybe that is the greatest achievement of -VOX PRO DEI-.

It doesn’t feel like an EP you listen to. It feels like something you survive.

There are moments where the machinery suddenly falls quiet, moments where the darkness takes on an almost dreamlike quality, and moments where Kevy’s voice cuts through everything like the sound of something dying in the next room.

But there is never any real escape.

The nightmare keeps moving.

The machinery keeps grinding.

The guitars keep tearing everything apart.

And just when you think you’ve finally found a way out, -VOX PRO DEI- pulls you straight back into the darkness.

It demands your attention from beginning to end, and if you give it that attention, it will repay you by dragging you somewhere genuinely fucking unpleasant.

And I loved every second of it.

So, Sean, congratulations.

You have somehow managed to create the musical equivalent of a sixteen-foot banshee demon crawling out of an industrial nightmare, and I’m apparently quite happy to let the bastard chase me around for another eighteen minutes.

OUT NOW!