ALBUM REVIEW: Dead Poet Society – ‘Monarch’

Dead Poet Society’s fretless, seven-stringed guitar is a miracle contraption. There’s no way to speak more even-handedly on it, not when it’s become one of the brilliantly fascinating sources of sound in modern rock. Without that one variable, Dead Poet Society would be on the level of the Badflowers and Highly Suspects of the world, where a subversively tortured pose is not guaranteed to hit. With it, they’re making an album like Monarch that, plainly and simply, bangs.

Again, no point in mincing words. This is Dead Poet Society’s best album, taking literally everything that defined them on 2024’s FISSION and just…making it more. It’s the result of sound palette that’s utterly unique within their sector of alt- and hard rock. Even this far in, no one else is doing this, the combination of heaving, downtuned riffs and microtonal uncanniness that gets more unbelievable with each listen. It goes without saying, then, that Dead Poet Society stand out. But more so than that, Monarch tromps along with an unearthly aura beaming out all the way through. It’s a weird, ugly, misshapen piece of riff-rock, and it’s all the better for it.

You’d suspect that Dead Poet Society would have it no other way. Hollywood On Fire begins the album with quavering Tiny Tim vocals from Jack Underkofler, held by wiry guitar pinches and decayed beneath eerie filters. When they become a rock band, it’s founded on a loose rattle where you actively hear the metal of the guitar strings vibrating. It might seem amateurish if it weren’t imbued with such purpose. That becomes even stronger on the next song Roach, with a lockstep piston of a drumbeat and guitars downtuned into a predatory scowl. With how base its moving parts are, Monarch almost feels deconstructed, or like the run-off of ‘normal’ rock music.

It’s never simplistic, though, or at least not in a way that Dead Poet Society can’t hammer out of shape. Miami For The Weekend is built on a White Stripes-esque riff that’s positively bright and punchy, until it crumbles and decomposes almost on the fly. There’s an unpredictability that riff-rock parades and pays fealty to, but never gets even half as close to as this does. It’s impressive how thorough Dead Poet Society are with that, as well. For an album as generally slow and plodding as this is, you’d presume that to be an automatic failure before hearing the oppressiveness of it all.

It needs to be emphasised, too, that the pace of Monarch is never a crutch. You barely even notice it, such is Dead Poet Society’s knack for some internal weirdness that always pays off. There’s almost an element of horror to it, like how Die If You Don’t and Sinner Systems become ductalised into screaming, metallic sounds wracked with discomfort. Psalm 136 takes another step and fashions its backdrop into something more human, like damned souls crying out in terror. (For a song named after a hymn celebrating God’s eternal love, with the first line “I was young when I was told that I loved God / But he made my mother go away in a black box”, it certainly fits.) Even when all of it pulls away towards the album’s end, its spectre lingers.

That, in no small part, is down to Underkofler and the figure that he cuts. His festering smallness is unconventional for music that (in the broadest sense) fits into ‘hard rock’, though like practically everything with Dead Poet Society, it lands on its feet. There feels like a lot of panic entrenched in this album, not in the least because songs like Die If You Don’t and Lost coat on the reverb to deliberately leave Underkofler overwhelmed and echoing out. But amid that, there’s rage on Roach, or something entirely more preternatural on The Park. It’s very un-frontman-like in the way it plays out, or at least in the traditional sense. Again, the feeling that Dead Poet Society could collapse or degrade at any point is such an arresting angle, one that Monarch never seems to drop.

Of course, you do need to understand that in relative terms. In the wide, wild realm of music as a whole, some upsetting noises and an off-piste fronting role does not an avant-garde creation make. But through the lens of what’s ostensibly still an accessible, fairly mainstream rock album, Dead Poet Society are almost entirely in a league of their own. The sound is punishing; the performance is dramatic and often elaborate; the nitty-gritty is…well, just not ignored. On a path that was already being charted independently from anyone else, Monarch is a continuation that gets everything right and then some. Brilliant, in other words.

For fans of: Highly Suspect, Nothing But Thieves, Muse

‘Monarch’ by Dead Poet Society is out now on Spinefarm Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall