Mares of Thrace - The Loss
Artoffact Records
May 16th, 2025
Calgary based hardcore duo Mares of Thrace have thrived on the crushing, brutal edge for more than fifteen years. Though they were on hiatus for a significant portion of that time, they returned with a vengeance in 2022 with The Exile, an album as vast as it was devastating. Vocalist and guitarist Thérèse Lanz was joined by Casey Rogers on drums, and the new duo cut a new swath in the bloody fields of doom and hardcore, once more reclaiming their place as a bold, uncompromising voice in Canadian heavy music.
With The Loss, Mares of Thrace plunge once more into the depths, delivering a concept album following the stages of grief outlined by psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. As a premise, it risks being a bit obvious, but the duo tears into it with such conviction and ferocity that any skepticism is annihilated within seconds into the first track, “Anticipatory Grief.” Within that one song, the band flexes their outstanding range, from muscular riffs to spoken word, finding moments of relative calm amidst the eye of the raging hurricane. The band embraces raw emotion in all its expressions: from scorching anger to broken grief. Album highlight “The Second Stage: Denial” features one of Trez’s most gripping, heartrending performances; at times naked, in pain, at others sheathed in fire—the very dualism required to cling to an untruth, to succumb to denial.
The Loss is an exercise in catharsis, but its fury is tempered at all times by grief, by uncertainty. There is a maturity in the duo’s expression of loss, in their embrace of all sides of the experience, and that vastness, that paradox of living with the unimaginable, the incomprehensible, is mirrored in the album’s compositions, in the music’s plasticity and resilience. To survive grief is not to recover exactly; it is to adapt to the new reality as best we can. Charting the course of this adaptation, Mares of Thrace have crafted some of their most daring and rewarding music yet.
