The album opens with "Telemachean Echoes," a short, grinding burst of power violence and hardcore chaos that adapts the novel’s opening scene: Stephen Daedalus waking from a bitter dream of guilt and loss. The lyrics, shouted and whispered, move from internal shame to furious defiance: “Hyperborean scrotum tightening mother killer” to the repeated cry of “Let me be and let me live, Agenbite of Inwit.” It’s a blistering introduction to the world AGENBITE MISERY has constructed.
From there, the album spirals into "Cascara Sagrada," a disorienting piece of blackened death metal that explores the quiet horror of Leopold Bloom’s morning routine. Built on warped time signatures, sliding guitars, and sections that move from Slint-inspired indie to full-blown noise assault, the song captures the mundane terror at the heart of Bloom’s lonely life. Lyrics range from meditations on defecation to biblical hallucinations: “Captivity to captivity, multiplying dying being born everywhere, the grey sunken cunt of the world.”
The centerpiece of the album’s first half is the 13-minute "A Charitable View of Temporary Insanity," a devastating doom-sludge epic based on Bloom’s experience at a funeral. Lurching between minimal ambient textures and towering funeral doom riffs, the song reflects on loss, failure, and the strange bureaucracy of death. The vocals echo with grief: “If little Rudy lived, if I had seen him grown, my son, me and his eyes,” while the final line offers a glimmer of hope: “The blood sinking in gives earth new life.”
At the edge of genre, "Whatness of Allhorse" reimagines post-punk and industrial through a metal lens. With deadpan vocals, massive drum machines, horror-synth textures, and a blackgaze-style climax, the track adapts a scene where Stephen Daedalus debates Shakespearean theory with literary elites. The chaotic freedom of that conversation translates into a song full of bold choices and layered absurdity. “He left her, and gained the world of man,” we hear before the song explodes into shimmering tremolo guitars and a final scream: “But I’ll survive.”
"Bellwether and Swine" brings the record back to pure metal, a pummeling, riff-driven anthem inspired by Bloom’s argument with a xenophobic Irish nationalist. The song weaponizes the tropes of epic metal to mock toxic patriotism, stacking sludgy power chords over blast beats, while spoken word passages echo Old Testament imagery. The narrator’s bile is palpable: “Begob, he got as far as the door. Begob, always some bloody clown or other.”
With "Circe," the band returns to black metal, this time with a psychedelic bent. The chapter in Ulysses this track adapts is a hallucinatory descent into Dublin’s red-light district. The song mimics this spiral with hypnotic guitar lines, overlapping time signatures, and an atmosphere of dread. At the climax, we’re given one of the novel’s most haunting images: “A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.” It’s a fever dream of guilt and memory.
"The Twice-Charred Paths of Musing Disciples" offers a brief, contemplative interlude. Inspired by the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, the piece uses dungeon synth textures and ambient layering to conjure the quiet moment when Bloom invites Stephen to stay the night, and is turned down. The central melodic motif is taken from actual sheet music printed in the text, adapted into a modern drone setting.
The record closes with the monolithic "Mnesterophonia," a sprawling, droning epic that mirrors the novel’s final chapter, told from Molly Bloom’s perspective. Drawing on indie rock, doom, and freeform noise, the track builds from intimate to immense. The lyrics pull from Molly’s internal monologue as she drifts into sleep: “When I put the rose in my hair and how he kissed me and I thought well as well him as another…” The final lines of both book and album, “Yes, I will, Yes”, are screamed over a wall of sound, sealing the record with one of the most powerful emotional moments in modernist literature.
Though Remorse of Conscience is steeped in literary references, its emotional core is universal. At every turn, AGENBITE MISERY seeks to translate not just words but the raw human experience: grief, desire, disconnection, hope. In doing so, they’ve created something greater than a concept album, it’s a reinvention of what metal can do.
There is no other band like AGENBITE MISERY, and no album like Remorse of Conscience. This is a project that refuses to compromise, refuses to simplify, and refuses to be easily categorized. Instead, it dares to ask the same question Ulysses once did: can we still find truth, beauty, or meaning in the wreckage of the modern world? And their answer, it seems, is a resounding Yes. Yes, we will. Yes.
