There’s a particular breed of artist who treats the studio not as a place to capture songs, but as a laboratory for exorcising ancestral demons. Jeremy Moore, operating under the Bell Barrow moniker, belongs to this lineage, one that stretches from the industrial archaeologists of Nurse With Wound through the tectonic drones of latter-period Earth. On Saltire, his second full-length in under a year, Moore doesn’t simply explore generational trauma, he constructs a sonic autopsy table where familial patterns of violence, addiction, and abuse are dissected with the precision of a pathologist and the fury of someone still bleeding.
Jeremy Moore wears many masks, though each one seems forged in the same subterranean fire. Between his work in Zabus, Zero Swann, and Gorazde, Moore has spent the better part of the last few years mapping the intersections of industrial noise, avant-garde metal, and dark Americana. While 2025’s CoreCore Pulp felt like a transmission from a dystopian future (what Moore calls the “tachyonic antitelephone”) Saltire turns its gaze toward the weight of the past.
Recorded across the humid summer of 2025 at SV Studios in D.C., the album is a strictly solo affair. Moore handles everything: the clattering drums, the growling synthesis, and a four-string fretless bass that often sounds less like an instrument and more like a heavy industrial cable snapping under tension. Released via his own Saccharine Underground collective, the record arrives as a 70-minute monolith of “noise flesh,” situating itself somewhere between the gothic romanticism of Dead Can Dance and the technical friction of early 90s progressive death metal like Cynic or Atheist.
The album opens with ‘Death Lullaby’, a track that suggests a noir-ish descent into the urban bowels of D.C. It is an ambient clearing of the throat, all rumbling textures and sewer-pipe echoes, providing a deceptive moment of stillness before the chaos erupts. When ‘Breath Of An Acrobat’ hits, the shift is violent. The fretless bass work here evokes the elastic, wandering lines of Geezer Butler on ‘Spiral Architect’, but filtered through a manic, free-jazz lens. It is frantic and jittery, a piece of music that refuses to sit still, mirroring the “cyclical patterns of violence” Moore aims to dissect.
Moore’s ability to pivot between density and psychedelic drift is most evident on ‘Beyond The Labyrinth’. Here, the record leans into a psych–drone haze reminiscent of Earth‘s The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, though the “honey” here is spiked with shards of glass. Screeching feedback periodically punctures the hypnotic guitar riffs, ensuring the listener never gets too comfortable in the trance.
The middle stretch of the album explores even weirder topography. ‘Sybian Interval’ begins with an immense weight, one that feels like a spacecraft struggling against gravity before dissolving into a passage of experimental dungeon synth. It is followed by ‘Cor Orans’, a track that carries its eclectic percussion and clattering against a backdrop of gothy, lo-fi metal.
The title track, ‘Saltire’, is a brief but concentrated explosion that acts as the album’s volatile core. It serves as a bridge to the more mythological ‘Bölvun Arfleifðar’, which translates from Icelandic to “generational curse,” anchoring the record’s high-concept ambitions in a soundscape that feels ancient and unforgiving. By the time we reach the endurance test of ‘Fourth Stream’ and the industrial screech of ‘A Carrion Call Rings Out’, the “tension and release” Moore promises has shifted heavily toward the former. The final track, ‘Ripping Hearts Out Of Hell’, returns to the prog-heavy bass acrobatics of the opening, bringing the album’s cyclical themes to a bruising, exhausted close.
Saltire is a difficult, often punishing record that demands a specific kind of intellectual stamina. It avoids the easy “three-minute pop song” structures in favour of a sprawling, 70-minute meditation on fate and salvation. Moore’s musicianship is the glue that holds these disparate styles—free improvisation, drone and noise—together. While the lack of vocals might leave some searching for a narrative anchor, the music itself acts as a Rorschach test for the listener’s own ghosts. It is a bold, ugly, and ultimately revelatory piece of work that confirms Bell Barrow as a vital voice in the D.C. experimental scene.
Saltire is available for pre-order and digital download via the Bell Barrow Bandcamp page.
Keep up-to-date with Jeremy Moore’s various transmissions on Instagram.
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