Doing It Again is not a comfortable album, and it clearly does not want to be. As a companion release to The Relay epoch, it feels less like a side collection and more like a corrupted archive: fragments, alternate transmissions, unreleased visions, instrumental corridors, and lyrical documents from the same devastated universe. It expands Necropolis Tellus not by making the world larger, but by pushing the listener closer to the body, the room, the transaction, the wound, and the repeated act of survival.
Musically, the album stands on Survivoria’s familiar axis of experimental progressive industrial metal, but its real identity comes from mutation. The tracklist moves between long cinematic pieces, harsh vocal-led cuts, and instrumental passages that function almost like scene transitions in a dystopian film. Titles such as "The Bandwidth of Blue Lights," "The Rust on Every Breath of Air," "The Miles of Decay," "Obedience," and "Eating Itself Alive" suggest a record obsessed with systems: surveillance, erosion, obedience, appetite, exhaustion. The metal element is important, but it is not the whole picture. The sound world implied by the project’s surrounding material is equally synthetic: cold pulses, darkwave pressure, industrial rhythm, glitch-like violence, and an atmosphere closer to a ruined machine-city than a traditional rock album.
The female vocal presence is the emotional center. In Survivoria, the voice is not only melody; it is witness, victim, weapon, signal, and sometimes a broken machine still trying to speak. The clean vocal side gives the record its cinematic sadness, while the extreme delivery turns pain into architecture. The result is theatrical without becoming decorative. The voice does not simply "perform" the horror; it carries the listener through it.
Lyrically, Doing It Again is extreme even by industrial metal standards. The title track is the clearest statement of the album’s emotional logic: repetition as economic trap, sexual degradation as survival labor, and trauma as a loop that keeps restarting. Its repeated phrase, "doing it again," becomes less like a chorus and more like a sentence passed by the world itself. This is not erotic writing in the romantic sense; it is anti-erotic, deliberately ugly, and focused on the split between what the protagonist says, what she must endure, and what she actually feels.
"Awaken, ye Sluts" is built like a toxic uprising chant. Its language is filthy, aggressive, and intentionally dehumanized, but behind the shock value there is a clear ritual structure: awakening, collective rage, poison, retaliation. It sounds like the moment where victims no longer ask to be understood and instead become something dangerous. That is one of the album’s most disturbing tensions: degradation and rebellion often use the same vocabulary, as if the world has left the characters no clean language with which to fight back.
"The Void" pushes the album toward cosmic-social horror. Its imagery of blue law, civic control, forbidden clothing, frozen frames, and an entity that behaves like an anti-presence connects the sexual and social violence of the album to the larger Relay mythology. The void is not just emptiness; it is a witness, a predator, a glitch in reality, and a punishment that traps people inside the image of their own disappearance.
"Space Within (The Relay Version)" offers a more minimalist kind of terror. Its language of cold hands, fading, grayness, and the collapse of day/night gives the record a dissociative center. After so much bodily violence, this track feels like the mind leaving the room. It is one of the album’s most important contrasts: not brutality, but numbness.
"Riven Re-Echoed" closes the lyrical circle by turning violence into memory. The repeated images of echoes, void, dread, and a nightmare woven thread by thread make the song feel like trauma replayed until it becomes landscape. Where the title track is immediate and transactional, "Riven Re-Echoed" is mythic: the private wound becomes part of the ruined world.
The strength of Doing It Again is its commitment. It does not soften its themes for accessibility, and it does not treat explicit material as cheap provocation only. At its best, the album uses obscenity as world-building: bodies become currency, language becomes contamination, and music becomes the machinery that keeps the nightmare moving. The instrumental tracks are crucial because they prevent the record from becoming only lyrical assault; they widen the frame and give the listener the sense of moving through districts, rooms, ruins, and psychological states.
The weakness is also obvious: this album will reject many listeners before they can reach its deeper structure. Its explicitness is relentless, and some of the shock-language risks overpowering the more sophisticated parts of the concept. But for an audience willing to engage with extreme industrial metal as narrative horror, Doing It Again is a powerful and coherent companion work. It is not background music. It is a hostile environment, a transmission from a broken society, and a study of survival when survival itself has become another form of punishment.
Verdict: a grim, cinematic, uncompromising expansion of the Survivoria universe - part industrial metal album, part trauma document, part dystopian audio theater.
