The Pull of the Inevitable: Automatic Monster - Black Holes (Track Review) Released: 8/8/25

 

"Black Holes" doesn't arrive so much as it accumulates. Automatic Monster, the Chicagoland DIY outfit that has built its identity on passion over platform and genre love over industry ambition, has crafted a track that operates on its own timeline and refuses to apologize for it. At just under six minutes, this is a single that treats patience as a virtue and atmosphere as a language, pulling the listener into its gravitational field slowly, deliberately, and with the quiet confidence of a band that knows exactly what they're building toward. The opening is disarmingly sparse. A lonely, hypnotic acoustic guitar riff establishes the mood before anything else has a chance to, creating an immediate sense of isolation that feels less like a production choice and more like an emotional state being rendered in sound. The vocals sit close in the mix, clean and confessional, and the production is raw enough that you can hear the scrape of fingers on strings, the breath behind the lyrics. It's an intentional intimacy, the sound of something being said that was never supposed to leave the room. The band's rhythm guitarist lays the foundation here with a restraint that lesser acts would mistake for underperformance, every note placed with care, every silence allowed to mean something.

What follows is one of the more patient builds in recent alternative rock memory. Subtle ambient textures begin bleeding into the mix, low-end frequencies thickening the air almost imperceptibly, the bassist's presence growing from suggestion to anchor as the track deepens. The lead guitarist works in layers rather than statements in these middle passages, adding texture and tension without tipping the balance before the song is ready. When the full band finally crashes in overdriven guitars, driving rhythmic pulse, the drums pushing forward with a slow-burning insistence, the shift lands with the force of something that has been earned rather than manufactured. The distortion isn't just a volume decision. It's an emotional one, transforming the quiet internal weight of the verses into something externalized and roaring. Lyrically, "Black Holes" deals in the language of loops and inescapability. Memories growing distant and endless, a sense of finality about a point of no return, a direct plea for someone not to follow into the dark, the writing establishes a protagonist who is simultaneously detached from their present and haunted by their past, watching a former version of their life recede without being able to look away. The invocation of time moving like a flat circle is the track's most philosophically loaded moment, framing the pain at the song's center not as something that happened once but as something that repeats, returns, and refuses resolution. The black hole becomes the perfect metaphor for that state, an anomaly that bends time and collapses everything into a single dense core of grief, from which nothing, including the listener, entirely escapes.

The vocalist carries the track's emotional arc with a performance that earns its climax. The progression from clean, close, and restrained in the opening to soaring and gritty in the final passages mirrors the song's structural journey so precisely that it feels less like a vocal performance and more like a document of someone actually breaking open. There are echoes here of the classic alternative rock and post-grunge tradition, the psychological heaviness of Tool, the dynamic intimacy of A Perfect Circle, the raw ache of Alice in Chains, but Automatic Monster wear those influences as context rather than costume. This is a band that understands where that music came from and what it was for, and they've carried that understanding into something that feels like their own. What makes "Black Holes" linger is its cohesion. Every element of the patient acoustic opening, the layered atmospheric build, the explosive release, and the lyrical fixation on cycles and collapse is working toward the same emotional destination. Nothing is wasted, nothing is included simply to check a genre box, and the six-minute runtime never feels indulgent because every minute is doing something. Automatic Monster has delivered a track that rewards the kind of listening that has become increasingly rare: headphones on, lights low, full attention given.

For anyone willing to meet the song on its own terms, what they'll find waiting inside is something genuinely resonant, a descent into the dark that feels, somehow, like exactly where you needed to go, so give it a spin and see what you think: 

Go give them a follow on Instagram: Automatic Monster