Baroness
– Gold & Grey
Gold & Grey is the kind of album that sounds like it was carved out of a fever dream. Not a nightmare—more like a long, strange walk through memory and distortion, lit by bursts of static and gold foil. Baroness doesn’t just blur lines here—they smear them, paint over them, then set the canvas on fire. John Dyer Baizley and crew craft an album that’s at once beautifully dense and gloriously unhinged, trading clean lines for a cracked kaleidoscope of color and noise.
Best of…
This is the band’s most ambitious record—sprawling, stubborn, and messy in a way that feels lived in, not careless. It lurches between molten sludge, delicate acoustic fragments, shoegaze textures, and outright prog weirdness. It’s as if Baroness built a sonic cathedral, then invited a hurricane inside just to see what would happen. The lo-fi smears and jarring transitions are deliberate—some fans ran to forums to complain about the mix, but that chaos is the point. It doesn’t want to sit still. It wants to shift in your hands like mercury.
Baizley’s voice has never sounded more frayed and human, and Gina Gleason’s arrival on guitar is a jolt of electricity the band clearly needed. Her harmonies don’t just complement—they challenge. Together, they give the record a tense, uneasy beauty. You won’t walk away humming the whole thing, but certain moments will cling to you—half-heard, half-felt. Gold & Grey doesn’t aim to be perfect. It aims to be real. And in its tangle of glory and grit, it damn well succeeds.
Choice Tracks
Front Toward Enemy
Opens the record like a car crash in slow motion. Angular, aggressive, full of spite and spit. Baizley sounds possessed, and the guitars jab like they’re trying to find soft tissue.
Tourniquet
A rare kind of fragile. Melodic without getting syrupy, it’s a wounded prayer of a song. The chorus swells but never explodes, holding back just enough to haunt.
Seasons
It grooves. It’s weird. Gleason shines here, pushing into strange harmony territory while the rhythm section barrels forward like they’ve got a score to settle with the metronome.
Cold-Blooded Angels
A long, patient build. Quiet and strange, with a sense of weight that grows minute by minute. It never quite gives you what you expect, which makes it stick.
I’m Already Gone
Straight-up one of the most beautiful things they’ve ever written. Dreamy, heartbreaking, and raw. If the album had a soft underbelly, this would be it.
Broken Halo
A muscular mid-tempo churner. Thick riffs, tight groove, and that slight sense of unease that runs under the entire album like a faulty wire.
Pale Sun
The closer feels like it’s dissolving before your ears. A drifting, ambient sendoff that fades like breath on a mirror. It doesn’t end so much as vanish.