The oldest rule in punk fits on the inside of a matchbook: get in, make the noise, get out before anybody asks for a solo. Bloody Dreams reads the matchbook, strikes every match in it at once, and lets the whole book burn down to the cardboard across the ten minutes and fifty four seconds of its closing song.
The Philadelphia four with stage names longer than half their songs, Devil Master, put out their third full-length on 4 September 2026 through Relapse, four years after Ecstasies of Never Ending Night and seven after Satan Spits on Children of Light, with Sean Lafferty on drums, Arthur Rizk on the master, and a running order that spends twelve minutes on four songs and sixteen and a half on the last two. The whole thing is over in under twenty nine minutes. That is not an album. That is a double bill.
So treat it like one, because horror was always best watched from the front seat of a car. First the trailers, scratched and loud and cut for people still hunting for a space in the back row. Then the features, and the windscreen fogs up.
"You Worms' Vain Delusions" is the first trailer and it earns the slot in two minutes forty one: drums blasting, guitars running headlong for the fence, the band's whole calling card spliced into a single salvo so that anyone arriving late knows exactly which picture they paid for. "Sex With Succubus" is the shortest thing here at two minutes twelve, which is about as long as any film with that title has ever managed to keep hold of its plot. "Trembling at Dusk" and "Death Anthem" fill out the rest of the reel. Nobody leaves for popcorn.
The guitars are why the lot is full. Across the record the riffs come out more melodic than this band has ever let them be, catchy enough to hum on the walk back to the car and still sharp enough to key it on the way past, a punk band's speed welded to a black metal band's bite without either one being asked to apologise. The drumming stays blunt and primal from the first bar, a man hitting the kit as if the kit had been talking all the way through the film. The vocals come from somewhere past the back fence and stay there, unhinged in the useful way.
"Bloody Dreams", the title track, is the first feature. It is the first song on the record to run past five minutes, and at five thirty nine it is where the band stops cutting trailers and starts letting scenes play out, the gothic horror that hangs over the whole album finally given room to walk down the corridor slowly instead of sprinting past the camera.
Then the main feature, the one the whole lot stayed for. "Farewell Waltz to Unfortunate's Palace" runs ten minutes fifty four, more than a third of the record on its own, and it is the reason the ticket exists: a waltz by name, psychedelic at the edges and folk in the bones, lurching from full blast into slow creeping build and back again, riff after riff spliced so fast that each reel melts in the projector gate before the next one has finished threading. Nothing else here comes near it. Mirai Kawashima of Sigh is on the guest list, and a record that can put him in the credits and still be remembered for its own songwriting has done something right.
This is where the album divides a room. Heard one way, the edges have been left rough on purpose, splinters in the celluloid. Heard the other, the master has put a coat of shine over the rawness. The rough reading is the right one. The print is scratched because the print is supposed to be scratched, and a clean copy of this film would be a different and worse picture.
The flaw is in the programming, not the picture. The four short songs are tighter and more tuneful than anything this band used to write at that length, and they are still trailers: twelve minutes of the band proving it can still do the old thing before sixteen of it doing something new. The new thing gets one song. A record under half an hour cannot afford to spend its best idea once, and this one spends it at the very end, when half the cars on the lot already have their headlights on.
The trailers are sharp. The feature is worth the whole ticket.
A decade in, Devil Master have made the record that finally answers the matchbook: a punk band can hold a song for nearly eleven minutes if the song is worth holding. It is for the punk who thinks black metal is fancy dress and for the black metal lifer who thinks punk runs out of ideas at the three minute mark, and both of them should stay in the car until the credits roll. Skip it and you have watched the trailers for a film you never saw.