Horror maestro John Carpenter, son Cody, and godson Daniel Davies return with Cathedral – fourteen tracks that score a nightmare of Carpenter’s own making and, in doing so, deliver the heaviest, most metal-minded record of his long and storied career.

JOHN CARPENTER

Some records announce themselves quietly. Cathedral kicks the doors off their hinges. John Carpenter – the man who terrified a generation with Halloween and Escape from New York, and who has spent the last decade proving he is every bit as formidable behind a synthesiser as behind a camera – has made the loudest, most muscular album of his musical life. He has done it with the two people who know his instincts best: his son, Cody, and his godson, Daniel Davies. This is Carpenter unbound.

The premise is pure Carpenter. It began with a dream he had in 2024, vivid enough that he woke needing to score it: a detective stumbles upon a corpse turned grotesquely inside out, a trail that leads to a derelict cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, and a second cathedral buried beneath it, where something ancient and patient has been waiting. The story became a graphic novel – written with his wife and long-time creative partner Sandy King and writer Sean Sobczak, published by Storm King Comics – and Cathedral, the album, is its soundtrack, each of the fourteen tracks pinned to a chapter of the book.

Where the four Lost Themes albums scored films that existed only in the imagination, this one scores a story Carpenter genuinely dreamed, and the difference shows in its sheer physicality. He has cheerfully called it his first heavy metal record, and while that is not quite the whole picture, it is not far off either. Davies’ guitars are pushed to the front and tuned down into the dirt, the Carpenters’ synths coil around them, and real drums and choirs lend the whole thing a heft the trio has only ever flirted with before. This is horror synth that has been to the gym.

PRIMEVAL

Opener Primeval sets the tone at once, a lead line slithering over a bed of pulsing electronics and cathedral organ before the low end drops like a portcullis and the track erupts into something close to straight metal. Identity keeps the momentum taut and widescreen, while Inside Out – named for that stomach-churning first crime scene – hands the lead back to the synths, all creeping dread and gathering menace. It is the sound of Carpenter doing what he has always done best: making you afraid of what waits around the corner.

Abandoned Cathedral is the album’s first real breather, a brief, mournful piece where the synths meet Kiara Ana’s strings and a churchly organ tilts the mood toward the sacred and the deeply uneasy. Then the two Elevator tracks arrive back-to-back, riding a hard-rock groove that would not sound out of place scoring a classic Carpenter chase – tension wound tight and released in increments, never quite letting you settle.

Desolation in the Underworld drags you down into the catacombs, a short, ominous synth crawl thick with foreboding. The Mapmaker and The Ferryman deepen the mythology – the latter leaning on Greek myth, ferrying you across the Styx toward somewhere you very much do not want to arrive. Here the trio’s cinematic instincts come fully to the fore, scoring scenes you can picture in vivid detail without a single frame of film.

LORD OF THE UNDERGROUND

And then there is Lord of the Underground. Released as the album’s first taste – complete with a visualiser built from the graphic novel’s artwork – it is the record’s centrepiece and its heaviest moment by some distance. Built on a galloping, thrash-adjacent riff, it is the closest Carpenter has come to a full-blooded metal anthem, and it absolutely rips. If any single track is going to convert the sceptics, it is this one.

Death of the Mapmaker is the album’s most tender minute, a plaintive synth elegy that lands all the harder for the violence surrounding it before Back to Ruins hauls the tension back up and points everything toward the finish line.

The closing pair delivers the payoff. Revenge rolls in on martial, insistent rhythms, all gathering momentum and threat, before Resolution brings the curtain down on a bed of deep, brooding synth – less a triumphant finale than a slow exhalation, the sound of a battle survived rather than won. It is exactly the ambiguous, unsettled ending a Carpenter story demand.

UNMISTAKABLE CRAFT

For all the added muscle, the craft is unmistakable. Mixed by Davies alongside John Spiker, Cathedral sounds enormous without ever collapsing into mush – the guitars bite, the synths glower, and Kiara Ana’s violin and viola thread real beauty through the gloom. Nothing is wasted; across forty-five minutes and fourteen tracks the record moves with the frenetic pacing of a good horror film, several pieces clocking in under two minutes precisely because the story demands it.

It is remarkable, really, that a filmmaker in his late seventies is making music this vital. Carpenter’s second act as a recording artist – the Lost Themes series, the reworked classic scores, the recent Halloween soundtracks – has been one of the great late-career runs in any medium, and Cathedral is its boldest swing yet. He has not abandoned the sound that made him a cult hero; he has simply handed it a bigger hammer.

Cathedral works beautifully as an album in its own right, but it is richer still if you follow the story alongside it, letting each track score its chapter the way Carpenter intended. Either way, this is a thrilling, propulsive, gloriously heavy piece of work from a man who long ago earned the right to coast and has instead chosen to swing for the fences. Put it on loud, turn the lights down, and let Carpenter run the projector one more time. The master, it turns out, is still very much in control.

John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter & Daniel Davies: Bandcamp

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