A few weeks ago, I saw a Reddit comment where someone described a panic attack as “a haunted house you built yourself.” And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that. Because yeah, sometimes your brain is the worst theme park imaginable. There’s no fire exit. The tour guide is you at your lowest. Every hallway echoes with memories you tried to forget, and every mirror shows you the version of yourself that didn’t quite make it out.
Listening to IN ALL MY NIGHTMARES I AM ALONE by Post Death Soundtrack is like being forcibly walked through that house. Not as a visitor, but like you’re being handed the keys and told, “This is yours now. Good luck.” It’s not a pleasant album. It’s not even an “album” in the traditional sense. It’s 30 tracks of screaming into the void and listening carefully to what screams back. And what screams back is… unsettlingly articulate.
Post Death Soundtrack is the solo project of Stephen Moore, a Calgary-based musician who, I assume, has never once had a chill afternoon. This is a man who doesn’t just make music, he excavates it, like he’s digging through rubble to find what’s left of himself. He’s been releasing music for over a decade, and with each album, it feels like he’s shedding another layer of skin. His 2024 record Veil Lifter got a bunch of love from underground metal blogs and “doom scene” people who wear sunglasses indoors. But IN ALL MY NIGHTMARES I AM ALONE makes Veil Lifter look like a warm-up stretch before the full emotional exorcism.
Moore makes the kind of music that doesn’t feel like it was written so much as extracted; it’s like someone handed him a tape recorder and said, “Whatever you say during your next breakdown is the album.” Imagine Nine Inch Nails if Trent Reznor grew up exclusively on art-house horror films and pet grief. Imagine early Skinny Puppy if they cried more. Imagine Jeff Buckley in a haunted basement. Now smash all of that into a digital blender and serve it in a cracked chalice. That’s the vibe.
Let’s talk about TREMENS. It’s the opener, and it was apparently finished while Moore was literally going through delirium tremens; a condition that causes hallucinations, seizures, and in extreme cases, death. It has a 15% mortality rate. You know what else has a 15% mortality rate? Nothing that should inspire a song. And yet—here we are. The track sounds exactly like its origin story: fragile, terrifying, barely holding together. You don’t listen to it. You clutch your chair while it happens to you.
Then the album does this thing where it spirals, violently. Tracks like GOOD TIME SLOW JAM and A MONOLITH OF ALARMS feel like panic attacks rendered in MIDI. They’re chaotic and angry and glitchy, like if your hard drive became sentient and started reading your therapy notes out loud. And then… suddenly, it goes quiet.
WE FALL is under two minutes, and yet somehow it feels longer, in the way that grief stretches time. It’s sparse. It aches. It doesn’t try to say anything profound about loss. Rather, it just sits in it. And Song for Bonzai, a wordless elegy for Moore’s recently deceased cat, might genuinely be one of the saddest instrumentals I’ve ever heard. And yes, I know it’s “just” about a cat, but shut up. You haven’t heard this track. It feels like mourning something small that somehow contains everything.
The album also features several covers, which normally would be a red flag for “please stream my reinterpretation of Leonard Cohen to help the algorithm.” But Moore’s versions are strange and ceremonial. Venus in Furs sounds less like a cover and more like a summoning ritual. River Man, recorded years ago in his apartment, is so brittle you can hear the room he was in. It feels like a relic. A diary entry left out in the rain.
And if you thought this album couldn’t get weirder; in comes SOMETHING STIRS, a track based on a traumatic event involving the theft of Moore’s kittens. Yes, kittens. And no, that’s not a metaphor. And yet, it becomes one. Because Moore doesn’t distinguish between surreal horror and real pain. He blends them. Trauma, in his world, is both literal and symbolic, like if David Lynch directed your childhood memories.
Now, look: 30 tracks is a lot. Not every moment lands. Some of the tracks near the back can be exhausting. But that’s kind of the point. This isn’t a playlist. It’s a transmission. A brain scan set to music. It’s not trying to be digestible; it’s trying to be true.
And you know what? It is. This is one of the most honest albums I’ve heard in years. Honest in the way that makes you uncomfortable. That makes you pause and ask, “Should I be listening to this?” Because it sounds like something you weren’t meant to find. But you did. And now you have to sit with it.
This isn’t background music. You don’t throw IN ALL MY NIGHTMARES I AM ALONE on while you fold laundry. You put it on during a thunderstorm. You put it on when the world feels wrong and your thoughts feel like static. You put it on when you want something that doesn’t lie to you about how hard being alive can be.
IN ALL MY NIGHTMARES I AM ALONE by Post Death Soundtrack reminds me that music doesn’t have to be tidy or catchy or algorithm-friendly. It can be scary. It can be messy. It can be honest. And it made me want to go back through Moore’s entire catalog just to figure out how the hell we got here.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
