Bleached Cross Release New Album 'Wrath' via New Morality Zine
The Brooklyn-based band's latest full-length explores themes of anger and redemption.
Bleached Cross has released a new album titled WRATH through New Morality Zine.
WRATH is the Chicago blackened dark-wave four-piece at their most punishing and most human, ten tracks that turn grief into both psychological horror and spiritual reckoning. Recorded with Andy Nelson at Bricktop Recording, the album trades raw volume for atmosphere and tension, building a sound that swings from suffocating dread to moments of massive, fragile clarity. It is a record about what survives loss: not the person you were before, but proof that love and pain can be carried together.
On the new record, the band shares, 'With this record it sometimes felt more like we were scoring a horror movie than writing punk songs. We intentionally pulled back on guitars and really focused on sound design and texture. It was a new approach for us, but the result is probably our darkest and emotionally heaviest work yet.'
Photo Credit: Matty Gagui
'Crucible' arrived alongside the announcement of WRATH, charging forth in anticipation of impending grief. 'Lingering Souls' arrived last month, pushing the band further into the shadowy edges of their sound, pairing eerie, spectral vocals and strong melodic hooks with layered, synth-heavy atmosphere and an almost dance-like electronic breakbeat. 'Blood Moon' served as the final preview of the new album, defined by shimmery guitars and synths, reflecting on memories of a lost love, culminating in an anthemic, cathartic ending.
WRATH represents the culmination of years spent carving out a distinct identity within underground heavy music. Following early self-recorded demos and a split release with Shamewave, Bleached Cross released their self-titled debut LP in 2022 through Protagonist Music, later followed by 2024's Columns of Impenetrable Light split with Boston's The True Faith. Along the way, they've toured and shared stages with artists like Frail Body, Secret Shame, Black Magnet, Bongripper, Cloakroom, Deaf Club, and Your Arms Are My Cocoon, while continuing to evolve beyond easy genre classification.
Next month, Bleached Cross will team up with Milwaukee screamo band snag for a tour across the U.S. that begins August 4 in Indianapolis, IN, at Healer. For more information and details on upcoming shows, follow the band on Instagram at @bleachedxcross.
BLEACHED CROSS LIVE 2026
AUGUST
4 – Indianapolis, IN – Healer
5 – Pittsburgh, PA – Roboto
6 – Philadelphia, PA – Deadbirds
7 – Brooklyn, NY – Gold Sounds
8 – Washington, DC – Marx Cafe
9 – Columbus, OH – Dirty Dungarees
10 – Chicago, IL – Casa Cafe
BLEACHED CROSS — WRATH — NEW MORALITY ZINE
Thorn Crown
Season of the Witch
Blood Moon
Crucible
Tomb
Lingering Souls
Torment
Requiem
The Dark
Wrath
ABOUT BLEACHED CROSS
Bleached Cross have spent the last several years refining a sound rooted fully in collapse and catharsis. Formed remotely between Chicago and San Diego in the winter of 2019, the band began as an exchange of files and ideas between collaborators Zak and Alex before evolving into a full live band in 2020. Since then, Bleached Cross have steadily built a reputation through emotionally overwhelming live sets and a sound that blurs the lines between post-punk, industrial music, darkwave, blackened hardcore, and noise rock.
On their newest full-length, WRATH, the Chicago band push every element of their sound further than before. Across ten tracks, WRATH explores grief as both psychological horror and spiritual transformation, tracing a narrative centered around loss, guilt, death, and the struggle to preserve love in the aftermath of tragedy. Ritualistic imagery, existential dread, and meditations on mortality run throughout the album, but beneath its crushing atmosphere is something deeply human: the attempt to survive unbearable loss without allowing it to hollow you out completely.
'Downfall and redemption of the self are themes explored over the course of ten tracks, while love's ability to reverberate beyond this mortal coil is central to the album's core, and the inflection point at which Bleached Cross offer us to consider how one can both come to terms with death, and heal in the shadow of loss.'
Recorded at Bricktop Recording with Andy Nelson during the summer and fall of 2025, WRATH was approached with an obsessive level of preparation and detail. The band focused heavily on tension, pacing, and sound design, often creating heaviness through atmosphere and noise rather than sheer volume alone. The result is Bleached Cross' most cinematic and immersive release yet: an album that can feel suffocating and violent one moment before opening into massive hooks and moments of fragile clarity the next.
Dark, mournful, and deeply sincere, WRATH captures Bleached Cross at their most refined and emotionally devastating. It is a record consumed by death, but ultimately driven by the possibility of redemption. An acknowledgment that grief changes you permanently, and that surviving it means learning how to carry love and pain at the same time.
Photo Credit: Matty Gagui
Photo Credit: Matty Gagui [Download Hi-Res]
