Bell Barrow: True Human Trough – Review

There is a thought experiment that occasionally surfaces in ecological philosophy: if humanity vanished tomorrow, how long before the planet reasserted itself? The answer, depending on who you ask, ranges from decades to centuries, but the consensus is grim for human legacy and rather hopeful for everything else. True Human Trough, the third album from Washington D.C.’s Bell Barrow, operates as if that experiment has already concluded, and the results are being broadcast back to us in a language we were never supposed to understand.

Bell Barrow is the solo project of Jeremy Moore, a multi-instrumentalist and military veteran who has spent the better part of the past year as one of the most prolific artists in D.C.’s experimental music underground. This is his third album-length statement in under twelve months, arriving on his own imprint, Saccharine Underground, following the dystopian transmissions of CoreCore Pulp and the generational trauma reckoning of Saltire. Where CoreCore Pulp channelled what Moore described as the “tachyonic antitelephone”, a sci-fi metaphor for social media’s self-devouring feedback loop, and Saltire turned inward to excavate cycles of familial violence and addiction, True Human Trough turns outward, past humanity entirely.

The conceptual premise here is one of ecological inversion. Moore weaponises sound into “a hostile transmission” from “extra-dimensional strata where insects, carrion feeders, and feral ecologies sit unchallenged at the top of the food chain.” The record’s title is not metaphorical embellishment, but a taxonomic position. We are the trough. In Moore’s own words: “We’re just as much meat as the ones we kill and defile for sport.”

As with its predecessors, True Human Trough was handled entirely by Moore with drums, bass, guitar, synthesis, production, and engineering all recorded at SV Studios across June and July 2025. Moore is also active under the monikers Zabus and Zero Swann, and traces of those projects’ emotional registers surface here, lending the record an intensity that exceeds its runtime. Musically, it pushes further into the jazz-core and progressive death metal territory first charted on Saltire, while drawing in threads of darkwave, post-metal, and what can only be called gothic nihilism.

True Human Trough does not take you anywhere, exactly. It does not arc. It does not crescendo toward resolution or offer the narrative relief of a conventional album journey. What it does instead is sustain a pressurised state of non-human urgency across eight tracks that collectively function less like a sequence and more like a single sustained act of sonic hostility. The music doesn’t blend its constituent parts so much as force them into uncomfortable proximity. Every instrument sounds entirely its own in the mix, bluntly bouncing off the others.

Opener ‘Solunar Theory’ makes this clear immediately. Free jazz abandonment announces itself through guitar riffs and percussion that refuses any obvious rhythmic agreement. It is freak-out music in the most honest tradition of the term, recalling the deeper, murkier percussive work of Painkiller at their most dissonant, with a production rawness not unlike the bass-forwardness of the self-titled Swans EP. ‘The Unbirthing Of Jackals’ follows with a metallic, Cynic-adjacent pulse, its jazz-inflected rhythmic structure dissolving into unbridled noise rock abandon, bass forward and slapping hard against the architecture.

The title track is where the album’s emotional subterranean layer briefly surfaces. There is something of Moore’s Zabus project here, a drama beneath the aggression that makes itself known before the music accelerates into an unstoppable forward momentum. It is the record’s most emotionally legible moment, and perhaps its most affecting, because the contrast is so stark.

From there, ‘Necklace Of Tongues’ and ‘Bloat Stage Infauna’ push the assault to its most unrelenting. Feedback crowds the mix alongside percussion and tension-threaded guitar; the former is among the most aggressive passages on the record, and ‘Bloat Stage Infauna’ escalates further still, opening like a runaway freight vehicle before mellowing into something only slightly less anxious. The tension never fully releases. ‘Rites Of Silent Spring’ and ‘Sermons In Deep Ecology’ maintain the free improvisation framework. The latter approaches its ecological-philosophical preoccupations with something akin to post-rock, due in part to its more spatial elements.  

The track titles themselves deserve acknowledgement. ‘Solunar Theory’, ‘Bloat Stage Infauna’, ‘Promession/The Last Vital Need’; these are not poetic abstractions but terms drawn from nature’s own administrative language. Decomposition cycles, ecological succession, solar and lunar tidal patterns all sit at the heart of these tracks. Moore is a military veteran who served in Afghanistan, and while the record is entirely instrumental, one senses an interconnected worldview threading through these references, shaped by an intimate, unromantic familiarity with mortality, territory, and the indifference of natural systems to human meaning-making.

Closing track ‘Promession/The Last Vital Need’ is the record’s most dynamic and structurally varied moment. It strains, chugs, fragments across multiple sonic environments, and reintroduces a quality of post-rock expansiveness that distinguishes it from the more relentlessly thrashy tracks preceding it. That Moore saves this kind of structural range for the finale is telling. It does not feel like a reward so much as a final, more varied transmission before the signal cuts out.

True Human Trough is a difficult record in the most literal sense: it demands attention and offers no comfort. But Moore has never been in the business of comfort. What this album accomplishes, more so than its predecessors, is a convincing translation of non-human perspective into sonic form. It does not ask you to empathise with the ecology it speaks for. It simply asserts that the ecology will outlast you, and documents that fact with abrasive precision.