He Didnt, the Oxfordshire-based solo project, released a new metal album called Dark Making, reviewed by The Quietus on August 13. Critic Sam Moore described a record with something tender trying to reach out from beneath its abrasive drums and chugging guitars, opening with the thudding violence of "Bass Tape Loop," a looping riff that layers in synths and drums until the composition threatens to collapse, then strips back to leave its softer instruments alone in a suddenly vast space.
Moore called that push and pull between overload and quiet the album's structure in miniature, repeated across songs including "Death to Self" and "Black Death Tarot," which follow a similar pattern of layered, chugging guitars pulled from both nu and industrial metal. "Throbsolete" broke from that mold as a highlight, the first track where a vocal sample surfaces from beneath the instrumentation, bringing what Moore called a sense of humanity to the record's often bleak landscapes, though he noted the track's ending arrives so suddenly it undercuts its own slow-building arrangement.
Almost exactly at the album's halfway point, an interlude called "Depressed Mode Interlude" functions as an overture for the second half, where instruments come and go in fragments as if the soundscapes can no longer hold themselves together.
That back half of the record includes "Industrial Nostalgia," which The Quietus called the strongest run of tracks on the album, with a softer vocal presence and a steadier drum pattern than the record's opening half; Moore wrote that the song lets its final guitar drone linger in a way much of the rest of the album does not, offering a glimpse of tenderness that keeps Dark Making from being just an endlessly violent industrial drone.
Dark Making is out now and logged on the release calendar, and The Quietus's review frames it as a record with real depth hiding beneath its aggressive surface, one that rewards listeners who stay with it past the opening tracks' harsher textures.
The facts
- Album Dark Making reviewed by The Quietus on August 13, 2026
- Opens with the track "Bass Tape Loop"
- "Throbsolete" is the first track where a vocal sample surfaces from the instrumentation
- "Depressed Mode Interlude" marks a structural shift roughly halfway through the record
- "Industrial Nostalgia" was called the album's strongest run of tracks
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