A New Release from Evan Ryan Canady

There’s a sense of muscle memory running through Trials and Tribulations, the new album from Evan Ryan Canady. Not just in the precise guitar work or the thunderous percussion, but in the way it calls back to a shared lineage of heavy music. It echoes long drives, burned CDs, and black band tees from years ago. Listening felt like reconnecting with a part of myself that still knows all the words to those formative records. It’s cohesive, unflinching, and reverent without ever becoming derivative.

“Ouverture” opens the record with a patience that feels earned. It’s not a sprint to distortion but a careful unfurling. Piano and guitar move in tandem like the first rays of morning light across a battlefield. When it breaks open, the payoff is massive. It was immediately clear this wasn’t going to be background noise. Canady is aiming for something cinematic and controlled.

The title track leans into contrast without chaos. Ambient textures stretch across the top of metallic riffs, but they never smother each other. The balance is striking. Around the three minute mark, a guitar solo tears through the calm like a controlled detonation. It’s technical, but also emotional. It gave the track a pulse I could feel in my chest.

“Reward of the Wicked” dips into darker waters. There are echoes of post-metal and alt-metal greats here, but what struck me most was how personal it felt. This isn’t genre cosplay. It’s Canady’s own mythology. “Ride the Wave” shifts into a grunge-adjacent mood, full of moody chord progressions and big expressive vocals. There’s a haunted quality in the melodies that lingers even after the song ends.

“Vikings” delivers exactly what the title promises. It’s stormy, galloping, and steeped in imagery that could have easily veered into parody but doesn’t. Instead, it feels grounded and serious in its bombast. Then comes “Rise and Shine,” my personal highlight. The guitar tone is clinical in the best way. It’s sharp, clear, and impossible to ignore. It slices through the mix with precision.

The closer, “Sands of Time,” doesn’t aim to resolve anything. Instead, it reinforces the weight that’s carried across the album. It delivers one final crushing blow before silence. It’s the kind of track that doesn’t just end. It leaves residue.

By the time it wrapped, I found myself thinking about how well this album would fit into a Doom game soundtrack. There’s a kinetic brutality here, something you can move to, fight to, lose yourself in. If Bethesda isn’t already taking meetings with Canady, they should be. Trials and Tribulations doesn’t just hit hard. It hits familiar, and it hits right.

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