Review: Robot God ‘Onto The Afterlife’
I’ve been following Sydney, Australia psych-space-stoner-rock power trio Robot God when they released their excellent 2022 third album, World Collide. Since then, I’ve kept a close eye on their journey, continually captivated by their blend of crushing heaviness, spiritual depth, boundless imagination, and fearless musical innovation. The release of their seventh album to date, Onto The Afterlife, captured my attention even more, not only because of its musical qualities, but also because of the way the band explores, in its own unique manner.
The long player’s subject matter, mortality, transformation, the unknowable territory beyond death, is not new ground for heavy music. Black Sabbath mapped much of this territory half a century ago, and countless bands have walked those same bleak corridors since. What distinguishes Robot God is not the map but the manner of the journey.
This new trip never feels morbid for morbidity’s sake. Instead, it approaches its themes with a kind of cosmic curiosity, as though death is not a wall but a doorway, and the band is simply brave enough to push it open and see what lies on the other side, adding another compelling dimension to an already fascinating record. Please come, and let’s explore the album together.
The A side opens with Soldier Of Love. This is a song of genuine emotional weight, marrying crushing riffs to something close to fragility. The title hints at openness, and the track honours that without sacrificing its raw power. It is the sound of a band sure enough in themselves to show feeling amid all the heaviness, anchoring the emotional tone with quiet confidence.
The title track follows, and this is where Onto The Afterlife begins to reveal its true self. A slow-burning, cinematic piece that builds with the patience of a band that knows exactly where it’s going. There is no rush here; only the music is taking its time. It rises like a tide, gradual, inevitable, irresistible, until the heaviness it achieves feels less like volume and more like gravity. This is a track that understands the difference between being loud and being ‘heavy’, and it inhabits the latter with total conviction.
It moves through distinct emotional and sonic territories interspersed with meditative passages, dissolving into fuzz-drenched eruptions…
When you least expect it, a song finds you and sends a kind of gentle turbulence through your mind. It’s Cerebral Annihilation that closes Side A and marks the record’s most intense moment. A near nine-minute descent into the album’s darker interior. The title is theatrical, but the track earns it. Where the opener had warmth and the title track had grandeur, this is pure void: dense, churning, relentless. It is the sound of the cosmos indifferent to human concern, and it is magnificent for exactly that reason. By the time Side A ends, you feel as though you have already travelled some considerable distance from wherever you started.
Enter the B side, and you find yourself enveloped in I Am The Night, a relentless, Black Sabbath-tinged wall of sound, with bass player Matt Allen‘s voice carrying more than a hint of late-era Ozzy. It’s the album’s longest and perhaps most extraordinary piece, running to over eleven minutes. It moves through distinct emotional and sonic territories interspersed with meditative passages, dissolving into fuzz-drenched eruptions, melodic lines drifting through thick psychedelic haze before the rhythm section reasserts its hypnotic, grounding pulse. It is the album’s centrepiece in every sense, a piece that demands the full darkness of a room and the full volume of a decent speaker system, just to be carried away, creating your own little world. What you feel is something hard to name, warm, happy and melancholic all at once, a feeling you want to hold onto forever.
And yet it’s the closing moments that give it meaning: a Long Goodbye, exactly as the title promises. There is a bittersweet resignation to this closer that feels entirely right; not defeat, but acceptance. After the cosmic violence of Cerebral Annihilation and the vast, sprawling journey of I Am The Night, Long Goodbye arrives like the morning after something transformative. The heaviness is still present, but it carries a different quality: elegiac, reflective, quietly devastating. It is the sound of a band that knows how to end things properly, which is rarer than it ought to be.
Robot God operate in a lineage that runs from the foundational weight of Black Sabbath through the psychedelic openness of Hendrix and into the sprawling cosmic ambitions of classic space rock. But they are not revivalists. They are inheritors who have absorbed those influences deeply enough to alchemise them into something that sounds contemporary, urgent, and entirely their own. Comparisons to King Buffalo are not unwarranted; there is a similar commitment to atmosphere and dynamics, but carry a slightly rawer edge, a slightly more visceral sense of physical impact that keeps the music from ever becoming purely cerebral.
As a full ritual, Onto The Afterlife is immersive, emotional, and unapologetically loud. It achieves something that most heavy music only gestures toward: a genuine reckoning with the biggest questions available to us, rendered in fuzz, drone, groove and the long, dark patience of five extraordinary songs. The afterlife, Robot God remind us, is not to be feared. It is to be explored. And they will make excellent guides.
Label: Kozmik Artifactz | Black Throne Productions
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Caccamo
