Album of the Week 15-2026: Dir en Grey – Mortal Downer

With Dir en Grey being ever the idiosyncratic band, and without the help of a new single to represent the album, it was unclear what to expect from ‘Mortal Downer’. Until recently, I would have said that was part of the band’s appeal, but the piece of steaming hot garbage that was 2018’s ‘The Insulated World’ turned that fascination into caution. Fortunately, ‘Mortal Downer’ is a lot better, though through a combination of a rather flat production and a few too many samey riffs, it fails to reach the lofty heights of ‘Arche‘ or the best moments on ‘Phalaris‘.

If I had to compare ‘Mortal Downer’ to any previous Dir en Grey album, it would be ‘Arche’. The production style is quite different, as the massive, reverberating sound of ‘Arche’ contrasts quite sharply with the oddly muddy sound of ‘Mortal Downer’, which also isn’t quite as drenched in atmosphere. It does feature a somewhat similar collection of shorter songs, however, that combine the progressive, almost abstract approach of latter-day Dir en Grey with a desire to have more space for melodies in the arrangements, possibly in an attempt to make the songs easier to replicate on stage.

For what it’s worth, the fact that Dir en Grey doesn’t quite explore the extremities of their sound as much as they used to is a welcome development, as far as I’m concerned. As much as Kyo’s vocal versatility was the band’s biggest draw in the mid-to-late-2000s, it was also a distracting factor in songs that, frankly, would have been better with a more restrained vocal performance. ‘Mortal Downer’ mainly features his clean vocals, occasionally multi-layered, plus an aggressive snarl and a barked half-growl. That continues the trend shown on ‘Phalaris’, which is a far more musical approach than before.

Though ‘Mortal Downer’ features some great songs, it takes forever to get started. After a two-minute intro that shares no atmosphere or melodic ideas with any of the following songs, proper opener ‘Kaijin ni Kisu’ appears to be working towards a climax that never comes, though I quite like its quasi-psychedelic middle section. It really isn’t until the second half of the album that the first actual highlights start to appear. If the excellent, dramatic ‘En’en’ was included at any point after that, ‘Mortal Downer’ could genuinely have started with ‘Hizumi to Ame’, and it would have been a much better forty-ish-minute album.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that back half is also where the most atmospheric songs are. The two back-to-back longest songs – ‘Mobs’ and ‘Void’ – are both brooding, mysterious songs that hark back to the band’s ‘Uroboros‘-era progressive heights, while the highly dynamic ‘Demand’ feels like a more compact take on what the band did on ‘Dum Spiro Spero’. ‘Moumoku ga Yue ni’ is the best of the heavier tracks in its ominous approach, though it does suffer from the production job, while the haunting closing power ballad ‘No End’ once again proves that Dir en Grey is at their very best when not trying to be as heavy as possible.

Despite all these critical remarks, ‘Mortal Downer’ is in fact a good album. It just is not an album to be unconditionally positive about, as there are frequent hints of how much better the album could have been with a crisper mix that didn’t bury Toshiya’s bass as much, as well as a more critical song selection process. There are moments on ‘Mortal Downer’ that once again show that very few bands are as good at combining the progressive and the accessible as Dir en Grey, I just wish it wouldn’t take quite as long to get to them.

Recommended tracks: ‘En’en’, ‘Void’, ‘No End’

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