At one minute and fifty-six seconds, “Amulet” doesn’t ask nicely for your attention. Rather, it just barges in like it forgot its keys, slams the door behind it, and starts yelling about regret through a broken vocoder. The7thGatekeeper, usually the guy smashing metal walls with sonic wrecking balls, flips the whole script here and drops a lean, mean track that ditches the usual doom for something tighter, sharper, and way more urgent. Forget slow-building atmosphere or noodling guitar haze; this is riff economy at its finest, with rhythms that punch like a boxer hopped up on espresso, and vocals slicing through the noise like a butter knife in a rock fight. It’s not hanging around to make friends; it rocks so hard it probably broke a few bones.
You could slap this right onto Sturgill Simpson’s Sound & Fury album, that gloriously scorched synth-and-southern-rock beast of a project that feels like a dystopian road trip with a soundtrack scored by a fuzz pedal and existential dread. Amulet doesn’t have the full-on theatrical chaos or the cinematic adrenaline crash of Sound & Fury, but it shares that same raw, ragged emotional grit. It’s bluesy, it’s industrial-adjacent, and weirdly danceable, like someone holding their shattered ego together with duct tape, distortion, and sheer stubbornness. You know the vibe: simultaneously desperate and defiant, a jittery groove wrapped in static and sweat.
Where Sound & Fury feels like crashing through a wall with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a guitar in the other, Amulet throws a quieter but no less sharp jab inward. It’s the haunted cousin who shows up to the desert rave late, half-lit cigarette in hand, ready to start a fight nobody wanted but everybody needed. No theatrics, no grand gestures; just a punchy, brutal statement that hits straight to the gut and doesn’t bother with apologies.
After the sprawling emotional carnage of The7thGatekeeper’s previous project, Breakdowns or Breakthroughs?, Amulet arrives like a jolt of pure adrenaline delivered straight to the chest; raw, urgent, and unapologetically loud in all the best ways. There’s no time to sit back and digest or ease into its rhythms; this track grabs you by the collar from the first second and demands your full attention, insisting you listen here and now. Simply put, The7thGatekeeper’s Amulet bulldozes through with zero care for convention or convenience. It rocks hard, it hits deep, and it absolutely refuses to let go of you.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
