I get why people don't like sludge or doom or any of the other myriad metal subgenres that live in down-tempo ten minute songs; I do. It can get tedious to listen to the same riff over and over again, and your mind starts to wander, and before you know it, you're humming whatever Taylor Swift song was on the radio at work today, and you finish it, and the song you were originally listening to is still going. I get it. There's a lot to think about in a given day. For these genres to really stick, they need something to pull you in, like technical mastery of their instruments or riffs that are as catchy as they are endless. Still They Pray, the new full-length from Richmond, VA's Cough, certainly has both of those things, but it has another thing going for it that I quite honestly did not expect to find: Still They Pray is one of the more existential metal albums I've heard, and as I listened to it, I found my mind dwelling on it and contemplating life in a way very few albums have prompted.
