Age Of Despair’s “Nine Laments” gave me a feeling I remember from hearing Heaven Shall Burn for the first time, years before they became such a massive festival band. That old-school edge-metal rush, the sheer excitement of it. You could almost picture yourself in the middle of a medieval battle, with armoured knights fighting all around you.
These guys from London, Ontario have brought some of that feeling back, and it’s pretty great to hear this style still being played with such conviction. Their new LP goes deep into people losing control of their lives, with a few apocalyptic horror stories and one painfully personal account of grief thrown in.
Guitarist Predrag Vujcic has spent quite a bit of time thinking about what holds the nine songs together.
“Nine Laments isn’t a concept record per se though its unifying theme seems to be the loss of control over our own lives and the demoralizing attempts to regain it.”
Five of the lyrics were written by the band’s first vocalist, Tim Drew, and the remaining four by Predrag. The two approached their writing differently, although the feeling of being trapped or having your life decided by somebody else keeps coming back. And Predrag enjoys writing about the ugly side of things.
“The pessimistic outlook is interesting to explore though we are not a negative band. The lyrics are honest but I don’t spend all my time brooding and dwelling on the negative .”
Tim’s five songs are the ones Predrag considers most closely connected. “Under the Wheel” deals with obsession, compulsion and self-destruction, the kind of cycle where somebody knows they’re being dragged down but cannot get out. In “Dethrone”, tradition becomes another way of keeping people in their place. The lyrics question why anyone should accept an existing order simply because they’ve been told it has always been that way.
“MachiNation” takes that idea further. People are assigned their places at birth, reduced to parts of a machine and pushed towards predetermined outcomes. The language is full of worn-out bodies, reprogrammed thoughts and people forced to keep participating in something they hate.
Then there’s “Systemic Failure“, with its institutional failures, denied dignity and people left to suffer the consequences of decisions made above them. The final words are about as bleak as you can get: “We were always on our own”.
The sense of helplessness gets much closer to home in “Torrent of Torment“. Whatever the narrator has been trying to keep outside has found its way in. Even the house offers no protection. The lyrics call it “A fantasy of control”, with the situation deteriorating until there is barely anything left.
Predrag takes the record somewhere stranger. He’s a big reader of apocalyptic stories and weird fiction, with Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Kafka and Orwell among the writers he enjoys. Those interests show up in the four songs he wrote, especially the first one.
“Murder the World” follows a survivor of an unexplained catastrophe who wanders through a wasteland, killing other survivors with a knife in the name of some mad god. He’s the cloaked figure on the cover, illustrated by Viltisvm, and he has another appearance waiting halfway through the album.
That comes in “End“, a 48-second track which arrives as the fifth song, well before the record is actually finished. The same character is now walking through the ruins of a burning city, taking in the destruction around him during what Predrag describes as a moment of clarity. The title itself is a reference to Clive Barker.
It’s a strange little story to drop into the middle of a metallic hardcore record, and Predrag has already decided the character will be coming back on the next one. There’s something quite enjoyable about a band giving its own apocalyptic wanderer a recurring role.
Age Of Despair have changed quite a bit since they began as a two-person studio project. They released “Beyond the Veil – 2025 demo” last September, worked through several lineup changes and eventually became a full five-piece.
“We’ve gone through a few lineup changes and finally landed on one that’s on the same page when it comes to the vision of what we’re trying to do. We disagree on little things but the vision persists.”
Aidan MacQueen now handles vocals, with Predrag and James Oag on guitars, Jake Wrobel on bass and Louie Hennessy behind the drums. Jake also recorded and mixed “Nine Laments“, which was mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios.
The band’s story is closely tied to London and the surrounding 519 region, where all five members have spent years playing in bands and going to gigs. It’s a city with a long hardcore and metal history, though Aidan remembers a period when the local scene was having a pretty rough time.
“In London, the scene was rather bleak for a while. Bleak in the sense that there were no new bands, and venues were shutting down (ie. Call The Office, APK, and EVAC).”
Call The Office had been a staple for years, alongside The Embassy. Both are gone now. Strange Ways, Jock and Underlier were among the bands keeping hardcore and metal going through those quieter years. Acts from elsewhere in southwestern Ontario helped too, including Bar Down from Sarnia, Reliever from Windsor and Just Right, whose members had also played in earlier Chatham bands.
Adam and Mike from Forest City Hardcore have since been putting on regular gigs at the Eastern Star Temple. Predrag credits them with breathing new life into London’s small but enthusiastic hardcore scene. Aidan has seen younger bands getting involved as well.
“Thankfully, as was previously mentioned, FCHC started booking at the Eastern Star Temple. This subsequently lit a fire for the younger crew.”
Mauling are among the familiar faces who’ve been coming to local shows for years, while Dismantled, MyPlaceOfRest and Hunting Season are some of the younger bands getting out there and doing their own thing. The Forest City Hardcore crew have also helped Age Of Despair directly, with Adam and Mike co-releasing “Nine Laments” under Pressure Point Records.
Also in London, the bookshop Midnight Mass has put on shows under the Underground Parking name at Honey Dip. Bigger gigs happen at Rum Runners and The Music Hall through SummerCamp Productions, while Casa Latina hosted Age Of Despair’s own record release show on 3 October.
London also sits in a pretty convenient place for touring bands, right between Toronto and Detroit. There’s a steady reason for travelling acts to come through, and with more local bands playing, people have something to build shows around.
Aidan’s attachment to Ontario hardcore goes back much further than Age Of Despair. Growing up, he was into Cursed, Dead and Divine, Straight Reads The Line, Searching For Satellites, Baptized in Blood, asightforsewneyes and Exalt. He also gives a shout to Day Of Mourning and Ignorance Never Settles.
He doesn’t claim those bands all had a direct influence on Age Of Despair’s sound. Cursed might be the closest connection. A lot of what stayed with him was simply discovering that bands he loved were from Ontario, sometimes from the same city or nearby.
“Especially when learning that they’re either from this city or region, or that they’re from this country. Ontario has a rich history of amazing hardcore bands.”
Back on “Nine Laments“, Predrag’s final two songs bring the record towards a different kind of ending. “Invisible Hand” returns to the question of control, this time with overseers, manipulators and people reduced to lifeless workers under somebody else’s authority. The words make that control physical, with a hand tightening around a person’s throat, before the song moves towards images of war and falling towers.
“Elegy” is much harder to separate from an actual human experience. Predrag wrote it about watching somebody close to him die in a hospital bed and living with what followed. The writing names the medical details directly, the blood, needles, tubes, jaundice and the body failing. There isn’t much distance between what happened and what he put into the song.
It’s the only song on the album that deals specifically with grief. Predrag’s other writing moves through invented catastrophes and controlling powers, while here he’s dealing with the death of somebody he knew.
If you’ve looked at the digital tracklist and wondered why “Nine Laments” only has eight entries, those final two songs are the answer. Age Of Despair always play “Invisible Hand” and “Elegy” straight through at their gigs, and they recorded them the same way. Streaming platforms present them together as one track to preserve that transition. On the vinyl LP, they’re two separate songs.
The physical record has been selling slowly but steadily, according to Predrag, although getting copies to listeners outside Canada has proved difficult.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find a US distro and shipping from Canada to US is more than the cost of the LP.”
It’s an annoying situation for a small band with a record people might want to pick up. The music is already available digitally, but anyone in the States looking for a copy of the vinyl has to deal with shipping that costs more than the record itself.
For now, the band are already messing around with ideas for another release. Predrag has plans for that cloaked character from “Murder the World” and “End”, and apparently his story has some distance left to go.
“Nine Laments” was released on 18 September 2026, with artwork by Viltisvm, a logo by Micah Wittliff and mastering by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios. The complete record is available through Age Of Despair’s Bandcamp, alongside the earlier demo. The next songs are already being worked on, and Predrag has one thing to say about the figure on the cover.
“He’s not done with us yet.”
