Bather

Bather come out of central Ohio with the kind of weight that makes a room feel smaller. Formed in 2019, the quintet, vocalist Josh Richter, bassist Trey Meyers, guitarists Jon Murray and Nicky Richter, and drummer Mike White, build their sound at the meeting point of death metal, metallic hardcore, and sludge. It is heavy in every direction at once: the low-end churn of sludge, the controlled fury of hardcore, and the bottomless menace of death metal, all braided into songs that hit like something collapsing under its own mass.

Their sophomore EP, Phantom Guilt, is the clearest statement of who they are. Released in late 2020, it was tracked and mixed by Andy Nelson, whose resume runs through bands like Enfold Darkness and Abysmal Dawn, and mastered by Daniel Colombo. That care shows. The record sounds enormous without ever sounding sterile, every riff dense and deliberate, every transition built to land.

The opener, "Suffer More," is a perfect entry point. Richter has said he wanted it to come out of the gate heavy, vocally punishing from the first second, while still carrying the moodiness of the lyrics underneath. The result is a song that pairs extreme, punchy vocal phrasing with chunky, riff-forward sections, and it works because the aggression has a reason behind it. The track is about being so in love with someone that you are willing to suffer in front of them, a contradiction Richter leans into rather than hides. That tension, brutality wrapped around real emotional vulnerability, is what separates Bather from bands content to simply be loud.

The rest of Phantom Guilt follows that thread. "Days of Torture" and the title track keep the momentum, trading in the same blend of crushing tone and lyrical heaviness, the sense that these songs are working through something rather than just swinging for impact. It is music with stakes, which is rare in a style that can lean on sheer force alone.

After Phantom Guilt, Bather went quiet, and then they came back swinging. In late 2025 they surprise-dropped "Fall Through Shadows," their first new song in roughly five years, featuring Matt Honeycutt of Kublai Khan. The single was produced and engineered by Matt Guglielmo of The Acacia Strain, two names that signal exactly how seriously Bather take their craft. The song digs into falling back into old habits, the familiar path you know you should not be on, and the slow-building consequences that come with it. It is a return that feels less like nostalgia and more like a band picking up exactly where their best instincts left off, sharpened by time away.

Bather are a group built for the live room and the late-night repeat listen alike, equally comfortable delivering a beatdown and sitting in a genuinely dark mood. They write heavy music that means something, that uses its weight to say something about love, guilt, and the patterns we fall into. For anyone drawn to metal that hits as hard emotionally as it does sonically, Bather are well worth your time.