NEUROSIS have been almost entirely silent about why they returned. Speaking to The Vinyl Guide podcast, Steve Von Till has now laid out the whole sequence — and it is less a comeback story than an account of four men working out whether they were still allowed to be a band.
The context matters. Von Till, drummer Jason Roeder, bassist Dave Edwardson and keyboard player Noah Landis quietly parted ways with co-founder Scott Kelly in 2019, keeping the reasons private at his family's request until Kelly publicly admitted to domestic abuse and emotional manipulation three years later. "We walked away from it in pretty uncertain circumstances seven years ago and weren't quite sure if, how, and why to make a return," Von Till said. "We definitely had to walk away and get some perspective."
The four met up at the end of 2024 to "put our feet in the water", and the music answered before they did. "As soon as we were in a room together with amps firing and the drums going, it just started happening instantly." Early the following year they asked Aaron Turner (SUMAC, ISIS) in — "we just had a feeling that he was the guy that was gonna help us complete the puzzle" — and once he joined, songs arrived quickly.
Von Till is unusually candid about the damage. "We didn't know if maybe our legacy had been tarnished beyond repair. It was just a heartbreaking situation we were coming out with, and embarrassing and humiliating." He describes what followed as "a certain amount of ego death": men in their fifties who had been in this band since they were teenagers, suddenly without the central pillar of their identity. "But we missed it. I felt in my body I was missing the roar of the amplifiers behind me. I was missing looking over my left shoulder and seeing Jason smashing those giant drums."
What finally decided it came from outside. Charlie Speicher, who founded Firekeeper Alliance — a nonprofit working to reduce youth suicide on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, and on whose board Von Till serves — asked whether NEUROSIS would headline Fire In The Mountains as the organisation's representative. He did not know they were recording. Neither, quite, did they.
"That new lens was one of responsibility," Von Till said. Heavy music, he argues, "has always looked darkness right in the eye. It's never shied away from pain and suffering." Being asked to deliver it for that reason "gave us a reason bigger than ourselves" — and studio time was booked the next day.
NEUROSIS played that show on July 25, their first in seven years. They join ACID BATH, MELVINS and KYLESA at Hellbender in Asheville, North Carolina on September 5, and play two homecoming nights at San Francisco's Fillmore on October 16 and 17. More dates are promised.
"An Undying Love For A Burning World", their first album in a decade, was tracked by Scott Evans at Studio Litho in Seattle over three weekends last winter and mixed in three days, six weeks before release.
Source: blabbermouth.net