Track by Tracks: Agenbite Misery – Remorse Of Conscience (2025)

Remorse of Conscience, the debut album from New Hampshire trio Agenbite Misery, is a fierce and ambitious undertaking: a concept record that adapts Ulysses by James Joyce through a sprawling blend of extreme metal genres. The title itself is a modern rendering of “agenbite of inwit,” a Middle English phrase meaning “remorse of conscience,” which features heavily in Ulysses. The band mirrors Joyce’s experimental structure with eight tracks, each drawing from a specific chapter of the novel and reflecting its mood and narrative through both lyrics—ripped straight from the source—and genre-blending composition.

Let’s take a deep dive into Remorse of Conscience, track by track.

1. Telemachean Echoes:

The album opens with a blast of fury and frustration. “Telemachean Echoes” channels the rage of Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses’s opening “Telemachus” chapter. The track opens atmospherically—dock bells, seagulls, crashing waves—before bursting into a blistering power-violence/grindcore assault.

Anchored by punky riffs and blast beats, the song captures Stephen’s guilt over his mother’s death with lines like “Hyperborean scrotum tightening mother killer.” The mantra “Let me be and let me live, Agenbite of Inwit” becomes a desperate declaration of independence. It’s a brief but searing introduction to the album’s core conceit: matching Joyce’s emotional tone with unflinching sonic aggression.

2. Cascara Sagrada:

“Cascara Sagrada” takes its name from a laxative and adapts the “Calypso” chapter, introducing Leopold Bloom in his morning routine. Musically, it’s a twisted, technical journey through dissonant death and black metal in the vein of Pyrrhon and Convulsing.

The mundane becomes sinister as looping, off-kilter riffs and polyrhythms echo Bloom’s monotonous domesticity. Lyrically, it swings between the domestic (“Kidneys were in his mind”) and the philosophical (“Metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls”). A nightmarish ending features a brutal barrage of lines like “Grey horror seared his flesh” as the band slides into a slow, dissonant descent.

3. A Charitable View of Temporary Insanity:

The longest track on Side A, “A Charitable View...” adapts the funereal “Hades” chapter. Bloom reflects on his dead son and father while attending a friend’s funeral, and the song mirrors this emotional weight with dynamic shifts between sludge, doom, ambient, and black metal.

From a serene, ambient intro featuring field recordings and voice acting to a cataclysmic sludge riff straight out of the Primitive Man playbook, the track drifts between cathartic heaviness and aching stillness. The line “If little Rudy lived...” cuts particularly deep. The track’s climax and its two final chords serve as a musical heartbeat—resonant, personal, and haunting.

4. Whatness of Allhorse:

Side A closes with a curveball. “Whatness of Allhorse,” drawn from “Scylla and Charybdis,” trades metal for industrial, post-punk, and synth-heavy prog rock. Built around a massive drum machine loop and garish synth layers, it channels Stephen’s manic literary theorizing into a “horror movie rave.”

The climax erupts in blackgaze ecstasy, with dramatic vocals screaming “But I’ll survive” and “I’ll pave my way.” Musically, the track’s final two chords echo the resolution of “A Charitable View,” drawing a connective line between Bloom and Stephen’s internal evolutions. The track captures Stephen’s chaotic intellect—and it closes the A-side with a creative explosion.

5. Bellwether and Swine:

“Bellwether and Swine” kicks off Side B with thunderous energy. Adapting the barroom confrontation of the “Cyclops” chapter, the track plays with an almost ironic take on nationalist grandeur—big riffs, epic vocals, but with a sharp satirical bite.

Anchored by a recurring sludge riff and a bombastic chorus, the song explodes with black metal chaos and spoken-word sections pulling directly from Joyce’s biblical and mythic exaggerations. The final reprise of “Begob, he got as far as the door” punctuates the absurdity of the narrator’s xenophobia with gallows humor and crushing finality.

6. Circe:

“Circe” is a swirling, blackened hallucination. In Joyce’s longest and most surreal chapter, Bloom and Stephen wander Dublin’s red-light district, and the track channels that nightmarish tone with hypnotic black metal, layered rhythms, and shifting tempos.

The band modulates time signatures and instrumentation, giving the song an intoxicatingly unstable feel. Lyrical highlights include Bloom’s subconscious torment—“Pig dog and always was”—and Stephen’s spectral visions. The song ends on one of the album’s most beautiful lines, imagining Bloom’s dead son grown and gentle, a bittersweet reverie in the chaos.

7. The Twice-Charred Path of Musing Disciples:

Acting as a moment of calm before the finale, “The Twice-Charred Path…” is a short ambient interlude based on the “Ithaca” chapter. Inspired by dungeon synth, the track is built around a melodic motif pulled directly from sheet music printed in Ulysses.

Atmospheric guitar layers, gentle footsteps, and swirling noise give the piece an introspective quality, mirroring the anti-climax of Bloom and Stephen’s final interaction. It cleanses the sonic palette and sets the stage for the album’s emotional conclusion.

8. Mnesterophonia:

Remorse of Conscience ends with “Mnesterophonia,” a slow-burning, emotionally rich track adapting Ulysses’s closing “Penelope” chapter—told entirely from Molly Bloom’s point of view. Drawing from indie rock, drone metal, and ambient textures, the song builds gradually from quiet introspection to a swirling, noisy climax.

Instead of focusing on Molly’s sexuality, the band spotlights her emotional complexity and inner life. Lines like “when I put the rose in my hair...” and the final “Yes I will Yes” are delivered with stunning force, closing the album with one of the most powerful crescendos in recent metal memory.

Final Thoughts

With Remorse of Conscience, Agenbite Misery has pulled off a rare feat: a metal album that is both literarily ambitious and sonically adventurous. Each track is its own chapter—stylistically distinct, emotionally resonant, and fiercely committed to the source material. There’s a logical arc to the album’s structure, rising and falling with peaks of chaos and valleys of quiet introspection.

It may not be for fans seeking a consistent sonic palette, but those willing to follow its path will find a concept album that pushes boundaries in both music and meaning. Joyce showed the heroism in the mundane; Agenbite Misery show us the transcendence in distortion, dissonance, and artistic daring.