Welcome to Good Shit You Haven’t Listened To.

Today we're going to take a look at the latest release from Vancouver hybrid metalcore trio Black Ivar, "Lovely House", which at the time of writing is not yet available to the public.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH IVORY IVAR

As with my review of Twenty Million People’s Live Rehearsal Tape, this is going to need a disclaimer right off the top. Black Ivar and The Evan Williams Project met on July 5th of 2025 as supporting acts for another band. We liked them, they liked us, we held hands and followed each other on Instagram. Since then we've been passively involved with each other as part of the Vancouver underground scene, and it was actually that TWMP review that inspired Do Nascimento to approach me at one of our shows to ask if they could submit their album to me for review. A few weeks ago they sent me an advance copy which is what I am basing this review off of - no compensation of any kind has been received or offered by either party, and while I will be providing the band with an advance copy of this review before publishing, I have no intention of giving a good review just based on our status as peers.

With that being said, I cannot say I am without bias. Black Ivar is great live, I think they're great people, they clearly work hard and have a skilled eye for aesthetic design and songwriting. I am also a sucker for any release out of the Vancouver scene that is self-produced - I hold a deep respect for any band who wants to take on the frankly monolithic task of learning audio production - even if the results are not as "clean" as something a professional studio engineer would create. DIY 'til we die, baby.

Which is why you, dear reader, may believe that my upcoming critique is unduly harsh. I must emphasize (and lazily copy+paste from my previous review) that I do not give undeserved compliments and I am not above criticizing the work of people I'm connected with. I believe that proper critique is crucial for a thriving music scene - bringing attention to areas of improvement and praising things done well so that artists can see what their work looks like to other people.

If you want a TL;DR... too fuckin' bad. You can spare ten minutes to read a few paragraphs. Let's dive in.

I FOUND A PLACE I COULD REBUILD

"Lovely House" comes in a little under 27 minutes and packs a whole lot into that timeframe. In the band's own words:

It was never intended to be a concept album, but as the writing and recording process unfolded, we realized that each song was approaching different sides of the same subject: being human.

(from press packet)

And the humanity is on full display throughout. Each song carries with it the weight of a different aspect of existence, from the internal struggles of grief and anxiety to the external assaults of corruption and greed. It would be easy to write 'angry music' about the current state of the world, and rightfully so - things are pretty fucked right now - but where Black Ivar succeeds so well in their songwriting is that their rage is steeped in a forward drive. Rather than a list of grievances, these songs act as a call to master oneself, and to develop resilience in the face of oppression.

We can’t control where or how we are born, or the challenges we face along the way. What we can do is work on ourselves every day so that our existence has meaning. In a way, the mind is like a house: we choose how we decorate its walls, how we clear the space within it, and how we care for the body that lives inside it. And with this thought in mind the metaphor is simple, to make our minds a lovely house to live in.

(from press packet)

The band hits this concept squarely and with aplomb; it feels like an album rather than a playlist. The tracks flow well and none of them feel out of place - this is an album that plays well front to back, and that gets a good couple points from me - and a good percentage of the songs here stand well on their own legs. "Waste of Skin", the 8th track and the band's lead single from this release, has well over 12k views on YouTube at time of writing in only three months; and well deserved, given the clear production value of the accompanying music video.

I recall watching said video when it dropped and, honestly, not vibing with it too much. In the intervening months it has grown on me, and I would consider "Waste of Skin" not just a standout track on this album but a standout track from the local scene, period.

While I'm in the mood for giving compliments, I need to give a particular shout-out to Klug on vocals, who delivers a consistently tight and raw performance across the board. Harsh vocals are not easy to do right - there are a number of "short-cuts" vocalists can take to get close to, but not really the level of intensity required for performance level, and it's clear she is taking none of these. Harder still is transitioning from screaming to cleans and still maintaining that intensity, but Klug kills it every time with a deep, clear, and powerful timbre that I suspect comes from a background in live performance. It's the kind of voice that could hit the back wall in a crowded amphitheatre.

The instrumental performances aren't slacking, either. The drums are impactful, frenetic, and driving throughout. Do Nascimento shows great range as a guitarist, moving from percussive and complex rhythm passages to soaring leads with skillful execution, and the tight interplay between the drums, bass, and guitars gives the songs a strong canvas for Klug to paint her vocal performance. The songs themselves are co-written by Klug and Do Nascimento, and they show a clear understanding of how this kind of music "works" compositionally. It is absolutely crucial in this style of music for the arrangement to be precise - and speaking as someone who is currently attempting to write an album in this style, it ain't easy to do.

When I review an album, I make sure to do a series of "intentional listens" - each pass getting more and more technical in terms of my focus. My first listen of this album was just on my phone speaker, to get the general vibe of it; my second was on my daily driver earbuds; my third was in my car; my fourth on my studio monitors and headphones. Even when I was focused on the details, I couldn't help but nod my head along to the songs. I left each listening session impressed at the quality of the work and if you're reading this wondering when I'm gonna start being a nitpicky bitch DON'T YOU WORRY but I would definitely recommend giving this one your full attention.

Still with me? Cool. Now for the second half of the review.

HOME INSPECTION

While I have nothing but great things to say about the songs and the performances, where this album falls short for me is in its production. And I should say this, first: when I hear "self-produced album", my expectations are not high. I produce all of my own work and let me tell you, I have done some shit work. The reality is that producing an album is a lot of work, and it's very technical, and when you're in a band it's way more enriching and rewarding to write songs and perform than to sit in front of a DAW for seven hours a day for a month, bouncing out a new mix every day to listen to in the car and on your shitty headphones and on a tiny bluetooth speaker while you make dinner and obsess over minute issues that, honestly, casual listeners probably would not actively notice.

But I am not a casual listener. I am a competitive listener. And while I was pleasantly surprised by the production quality on display - compared to some other work I and other independent producers have done - I have my complaints, and they do unfortunately get in the way of my enjoyment of some of these tracks.

First off, I'd like to bring your attention to the waveforms I've attached above. We'll ignore the opening track as well as track 6 as they serve more as transition pieces, but it's clear just from a glance that not all of these were mastered equally. Tracks 2, 5, 7, 8, and 9 all seem to be hitting the same peaks, whereas 3 and 4 definitely are not - and track 10 is actually lower in peak levels than everything else. If the goal is to have a contiguous through-line across the album, consistent mastering is a must, and if I didn't know any better I would assume that three different engineers worked on these groups of songs in isolation.

Even more peculiar to me is the levels that these songs hit. Below is a track-by-track breakdown based off of the raw WAV files I was provided for review.

Once again, we'll ignore tracks 1 and 6. For those of you not in the know, songs generally get mastered to a peak level of +0.0 (or -0.1 True Peak) for CD and digital download, but get limited to -1.0 for streaming as the major players in that realm recommend some headroom so their in-app DSP doesn't do weird shit to your tracks. This is because of reasons that I'm sure someone with a YouTube channel would be happy to explain to you, but the gist of it is that as a mastering engineer it's your goal to make your song about as loud as other songs in your genre, and peak + LUFS readings will give you an idea of what you may or may not be doing to achieve that. If you're hitting -0.1 True Peak, but your LUFS-I is sitting at -18.0, and you're mastering a heavy metal track, you've got a lot of room to compress harder, clip off some peaks, lower the dynamic range. If it's a jazz trio, it's a different story.

And these levels are not set in stone. At the end of the day, if it sounds good and is about as loud as other songs you like, it's probably fine. And if every track was hitting -2.2 Peak, I'd be happy to wash my hands of it and call it an artistic choice. This is not the case, and what it tells me is that the same level of care and attention to detail that went into the songwriting was not present in the mastering process.

But who cares, right? It really only matters if you're listening to the album front to back, all the way through... which is clearly the intent. And also where my nitpicks become tangible. Let's break it down.

Track 1, Lovely House, is a great opener. It's tense, it's atmospheric, and the sound design is clean and effective. Then we transition into The Anxious Pressure of Proximity, and it immediately feels as though something has been lost: the guitars and bass feel scooped and as though they've been panned a little bit to one side, made more obvious by the SFX which are equally present in both ears. During the instrumental before the second chorus it feels as if there's supposed to be a guitar part on the left side but it is so buried beneath everything else it just reads as background noise. Going into the "I beg you" section feels, to me, as if the bus compressor on the master track has been over-tuned - or that the SFX are so comparatively loud and sustained that they're triggering it to squash the mix harder - and so a piece that should hit way harder than anything else up to this point just deflates. The ending breakdown is heavy and fun, but the guitar and bass seem like they're out of sync, which takes away from the overall feeling of precision and intentionality.

And then Overreaction starts, and it's quieter than the last song. Not by much, mind you, but the power and volume from the previous track just doesn't carry over. It's a jarring transition that hampers the impact of the song going into it, and so despite Klug's impactful "Here I Stand" it feels like the band has taken a step back. The guitars, in terms of the mix, also do not feel strong here - until near the end of the song where they seem to find the space and clarity that they needed in the last track as well as the beginning of this one. Another little nitpick of mine is in the double kick section, where the volume of the kick actually gets quieter, presumably because of a too-slow release time on a compressor somewhere in the chain. The result is that the most intense moment in the track loses its power.

Track 4, Lucid, again starts quieter than the previous track, made even more prominent by the explosiveness of Overreaction's ending, and overall the SFX and ear candy are probably too hot in the mix, which makes for a frustrating cycle of turning up the volume to enjoy the instruments only to have to turn it back down when the effects hit. But when these effects aren't present, the mixing on the instruments is the best it's been on the album so far. The chorus on this song, very Slipknot-coded, is genuinely great and a real highlight - I can see this one being a live staple.

Bad News opens with a surprise - synths! - and marks a turning point on the album in terms of production quality. The band's skill in arrangement is made clear here, with the more subdued verses leaving space for Klug's vocals to really shine, and overall the song is solid from beginning to end. I did, however, notice a clear error around the 2:59-3:01 mark: after a quiet vocal passage, only one guitar track comes in at the correct time, with the second one entering maybe a half a bar later, and the difference in weight and impact is immediately noticeable when it does. I'm inclined to believe this is an actual mistake rather than an intentional staggering of the tracks, and I get it, shit happens - I made a similar error on the initial release of my EP "24 30", on the song The Price of Freedom, fixing it in the 2021 remaster. The song is strong enough that I can overlook the flub.

We get more great sound design on May This Cold Lead Me to Everlasting..., which is then supposed to seamlessly fade into the following track, but alas, a small error occurs here as well.

I regret to inform you that this is the kind of thing that would drive me nuts when listening to an album. If you're considering submitting your album for review, please keep this in mind. (Side note: Black Ivar was fully aware of my level of psychosis before submitting.)

And it's really too bad, because Comfort is the best the album has sounded up to this point. Wide guitars, punchy and beefy mix, great balance, everything is working together here. The subs hit hard. The bass is juicy, if a little top-heavy. The playing is tight. This is also the loudest track on the album, hitting an LUFS-M (maximum loudness) of -6.9, nearly a full decibel louder than the second-loudest track. It was enough of a difference that I had to adjust the volume a touch during my listens, which means whoever mixed it is literally Satan (please note this is sarcasm). There is also a very jarring effect applied to the guitars at around 2:12 that would have been much cooler sounding if it was a bit more gradual - the abruptness makes it land poorly instead. But despite my complaints, this track is solid, and delivers the overarching theme of the album:

Comfort expands on the concept of grief as part of life and offers a loud response to it: endurance. You need resilience and a thick skin to survive the "human experience". It's not easy, not fair and the ending is the same for all of us. We can only hope that, when all is said and done, this cold leads us to everlasting comfort.

(from press packet)

From here on it's hit after hit. The chorus of Waste of Skin has been in my head for days. Hellbringer comes on with a commanding intensity and benefits greatly from being mastered a bit louder. Both of these would be absolute ragers live, and my complaints are minimal. And then track 10 starts, and everything changes.

The Light That Never Fades opens with washy shimmers and a pristine guitar line, leading into what I consider the best track on the entire album. The sound design is stellar throughout. Everything feels wide, full, and huge. The arrangement is phenomenal, and it carries a Devin Townsend / Turnstile-ish quality that I greatly appreciate. This is the best mixing on the album, period - everything is working to create a truly beautiful, uplifting soundscape which already made me emotional on my initial listens, but even more so after reading the story behind it. I would do no justice to it by paraphrasing, so here's the band themselves:

The instrumental for this song was written long before the rest of the album. Because of its uplifting, major-key character, we originally set it aside, feeling that it didn’t quite fit the darker tone of our sound. For a long time, we never expected it to be released.

“The Light That Never Fades” ultimately became something much more personal. The song is dedicated to a very special little girl who left this world in 2025. She was close to the band, and although she never had the chance to see us play live, she was one of our biggest supporters.

Our singer Julia used to babysit her, and during those moments she would often share new riffs and ideas we were working on. She would dance and jump, but would always tell us to "make a happy song". So this one is for her.

Her name was Gandom. She was eight years old, and we like to imagine that somewhere, every time this song plays, she’s still dancing.

(from press packet)

The voice message at the end - presumably, Gandom herself - is a wonderful addition. The song is heartbreaking, but Klug does not let us wallow in despair:

You are a wheat in the wind, dancing
I'll miss you until I'm old and fading
But I'll meet you in the light that never fades
In the golden fields where you're safe

(The Light That Never Fades)

It's a beautiful tribute, and a great closer to the album. My only complaint is that I was left wanting; the instruments cut out too soon. I wanted to sit in that wash longer, breathe with the band in that moment, let it fade out. But it's not enough to take points away from what is definitively my favourite track from this release.

So wow! That was a lot, you might say, clearly this guy hated this album. WRONG. I told you already, I'm a picky bitch, but I also have the self awareness to recognize that things that bother me probably don't bother most people. I'm coming at this from my perspective as someone who works with audio every day of the week; I have my preferences and my biases. I feel the need to reiterate to you that this is one of the strongest self-produced releases I've heard from this scene to date. Black Ivar are punching way above their weight, and if the kinks were ironed out, I could see this album making a huge splash. And maybe it will regardless, and I'll be cheering them on from my cave where I obsess over waveforms and statistics. There is real talent on display here, great songwriting, great performances, and I love a good concept album.

My verdict? This is certified Good Shit™ and you ought to listen to it, and go see them live when you get the chance. Hit up their website for links to streaming (side note to the band: please make a Bandcamp! I want to buy this!) and spread the word:

It’s Black Ivar motherfuckers

(Lucid)