Motherfucker, I am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”…

This is an immensely punishing album. One song. Just over one hour of length. It is a raucous, meandering journey of cavernous depths and harrowing heights. Throughout this review, I will allude to various points in the album simply by timestamp (0:00:00, hour:minute:second), but I think it is important to emphasize that part of the “charm” (if such a word could ever be feasibly applied to this album) is in the way Motherfucker… melts into one furious storm that is exceedingly difficult to break into sections. To listen to this Shearling record, is to submit oneself to a musical experience that is as challenging as it is rewarding. The sense of accomplishment that comes with every full listen is powerful, if only because of the obvious emotional weight imbued in the project. It feels as if it’s a project that required sacrifice of mind, body, spirit? Certainly sanity. I find this perhaps most poignantly embodied at 57:30. when we are confronted with this high pitched whine and Alex Kent singing in a cracking, terrified voice:

I need to know now
I need to know, right this instant, now
What’s gonna happen to the horses?

It is an eerie and shockingly raw performance: one of many such moments on the record.

One of my favorite passages on the album is the final few minutes, a moment of ostensible respite that then morphs into what sounds like a plane hurtling uncontrollably towards a fiery end in the background. It reminds me almost of GY!BE. The very last minute is punctuated by haggard screaming. It is a memorable end, to the say the absolute least.

I start with the end of Motherfucker… because it is a more true representation of a singular journey into the pit of hell than perhaps any album I have ever heard; naturally, with such a piercingly monstrous descent, there is an omnipresent sense of this inexorable end that permeates the entire song. On my first listen, I was struck by the many layers that alternately consume, and relinquish, to each other. It felt as if I was strapped to a bobsled, sliding down the gullet of an endless serpent: specifically, Lucifer. For the biblical themes run deep in this project, most exemplified in the constant allusions to Adam and Eve. All of this contributes to the hellish sensation of listening, especially when you don’t know the ending, or if there even is one. Maybe it goes forever? A never-ending nightmare?

And yet, there is an end. And it is an end I think forward towards with each listen. As if every listen is a conscious choice to activate a ride that ends in death, a la Ride the Cyclone. Along the ride, there are twists, and turns, but also fiery explosions and ensnaring wastelands. Throughout it all, as so powerfully demonstrated by the end, there is an overwhelming sensation of emotional turbulence: one that is as varied as it is charged. There are notes of rage, frustration, menace, and grief, to name just a few.

I see Motherfucker… as a massive painting. It is one image, simultaneously of a horse on its side, and of a cataclysmic hurricane. You zoom in on any sole point, and you will find a specific whine of a guitar, a rattle of a cowbell. The album is composed of seemingly endless individual brushstrokes like these, each with their own personality. When you zoom back out, you see the terrifying magnitude of the full musical maelstrom. But the act of listening is, albeit paradoxically, not only manageable, but invigorating. With each subsequent play, I am more fully aware of the entire picture, and my anticipation for specific moments is all the more heightened.

For instance, one of the highlights of the album for me is this one section less than a minute that opens with a hypnotic cowbell, its rhythmic knocking seemingly piercing my utter being with its unavoidable resonance, only to merge into roaring guitar riff that keeps repeating like a machine booting up that will swallow me whole. It is ended off by the faintest, most delicate keys of maybe the album. I look forward to this part every single time I listen, along with many other, similarly majestic moments.

Such is the essence of the timeless beauty I see in Motherfucker, I am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”…: it is an album that pushes what it means to create a cohesive musical experience to some of the greatest extents I have ever witnessed.

This is not an easy listen, but I think it is not only one of the most rewarding of 2025, but of the album as a medium itself.