HOURS OF WORSHIP are a New York City/Lisbon-based duo creating depressing music. Their music contains tragic sadness built around epic, doomed themes. Second-wave black metal atmosphere and goth depression appear in equal measures to create a distinct sound. One listen to the duo's debut album, The Cold That You Left, will leave a lasting impression that HOURS OF WORSHIP have indeed created a distinct sound. While something electronically oriented being on IRON BONEHEAD may seem anathema to the label's original tenets, it's worth noting that IRON BONEHEAD first introduced ROPE SECT and LIGHT OF THE MORNING STAR to the world - both groups being far closer to deathrock and early goth than anything conventionally "extreme." Nevertheless, the emotions coursing through The Cold That You Left are, in fact, extremely intense. Lyrically, HOURS OF WORSHIP's deeply personal focus is on themes of nihilism, misanthropy, and veneration of isolation, and they wrap these weighty themes in a dark, sometimes-detouring pulse full of wide-open spaces. That the duo manage to somehow be paradoxically suffocating with this deceptively sensual, spacious sound is a black magick known only to them. Beautifully bleak and impossibly dense, The Cold That You Left is a clarion call for all outsiders: members Trembling Master and Wound ruminate on their endless, cruel, and unusual hate for this piece-of-shit world. Fans of Death in June, Type O Negative, early The Cure, Shape of Despair, and Lifelover will embrace HOURS OF WORSHIP's uniquely hopeless offering.