Doom-metal balladeers and (early -ing band-name adopters) Warning announced this morning that their first album in 20 years will arrive over the summer. Rituals of Shame serves as a follow-up to 2006’s canonical Watching From a Distance, with the towering lead single “Stations” feeling like a continuation of that record’s borderline-slowcore musical palette. The album will be out via Relapse Records, who were previously responsible for releasing the recordings from Warning’s 2017 reunion show at Roadburn where they performed Watching From a Distance in full.
Since 2011, frontman Patrick Walker has been releasing a slightly gentler version of Warning-esque songs via his 40 Watt Sun project after assuring fans that he’d said all he needed to say with his previous band. Yet as new material began to come together—and perhaps in the wake of Warning becoming something of a cult phenomenon over the past two decades—it became evident that the music he’d begun working on in January 2025 better suited the snail’s-pace metal riffage of Warning. The five songs he recorded for the project were written in a remote part of Florence, Italy, and the results were put to tape at a 140-year-old converted church in Southport, UK.
Check out the first taste of Rituals of Shame below, and expect the whole album to arrive on June 19.
