Rating: 9 / 10 Stars
PUSCIFER is: Maynard James Keenan (Vocals and Additional Synths), Mat Mitchell (Bass, Guitar, Synths, and Stick), Carina Round (Vocals, Vocal Sampling, and Additional Synths), with Gunnar Olsen (Drums), Greg Edwards (Bass), Sarah Jones (Drums), Tony Levin (Additional Bass), Danny Carey (Drums), and Mr Ian Ross (Narration)
REVIEW – Normality has never been part of PUSCIFER’s operating system. If anything, the project has always existed as a beautifully warped escape hatch from ordinary rock-band logic: part band, part theater troupe, part desert broadcast, part sketch-comedy hallucination, part electronic art-rock laboratory, part moving target. With Normal Isn’t, set to arrive February 6, 2026 through Puscifer Entertainment / Alchemy Recordings / BMG, Maynard James Keenan, Mat Mitchell, and Carina Round seem ready to drag that long-running experiment into one of its darkest, sharpest, and most guitar-forward chapters yet. The official album listing confirms the 11-track set and frames it as Puscifer’s first new album in more than five years, built from post-punk roots, goth shading, and a more aggressive guitar presence than some earlier entries in the catalog.
That title, Normal Isn’t, is pure Puscifer because it works as both joke and diagnosis. It sounds like a shrug from a project that has spent nearly two decades refusing to behave, but it also lands like a field report from the current cultural wreckage. The world has become an argument machine. The feed is a slaughterhouse of outrage. Everyone is screaming into their own reflective surface, mistaking attention for meaning and reaction for thought. Puscifer’s gift has always been turning that absurdity into something sleek, strange, and weirdly danceable. Here, the absurdity has teeth.
The opening “Thrust” pushes the listener directly into the friction. Lyrically, it wrestles with the exhausting daily effort of keeping composure in the middle of petty people, rabble-goading noise, and the kind of modern irritations that turn civility into a combat sport. Musically, it feels like a mission statement for the album’s new muscle: rhythm as pressure, repetition as agitation, electronics as nervous-system static. Puscifer have always known how to groove, but “Thrust” suggests a version of the band more willing to let the pulse bruise.
The title track “Normal Isn’t” takes the album’s central unease and gives it a wounded, almost prayer-like shape. Its plea for serenity and tranquility is not soft. It is desperate. The song is about footing and balance after they have already been damaged, about triggers that remain live, about the failure of forgetting as a survival strategy. Sarah Jones’s syncopated drum work and the dueling bass presence of Greg Edwards and Tony Levin give the track a remarkable internal motion, as if the song itself is trying to regulate a system that refuses to calm down. This is Puscifer at their most elegant and unsettled.
“Bad Wolf” leans into the record’s simulation-age paranoia. The good wolves are dead, the keepers have fled, and the bad wolves thrive. It is not subtle, but Puscifer are rarely best when subtlety means pulling the punch. The track’s throbbing bass-synth movement, flickering keys, and woozy vocal transmissions create a mood of digital dread and moral imbalance. Maynard’s line about believing we live in a simulation lands less like sci-fi novelty than exhaustion: when the world becomes this absurd, unreality starts looking like the most rational explanation.
Then comes “Self Evident,” the album’s most gloriously venomous insult machine. Built around a meaty guitar chug, a steady Gunnar Olsen drum pulse, and Maynard’s mission to make “bunghole” function inside a song without collapsing the architecture, it does exactly what Puscifer do best: turns ridiculous language into a serious weapon. Carina Round’s English-woman-with-a-knife vocal presence gives the track extra bite, and the song becomes less a novelty than a cathartic purge of everyday idiocy. Apple Music’s album notes also identify “Self Evident” as one of the album’s official videos, underlining its role as a key public-facing track from the record.
“A Public Stoning” stretches past six minutes and feels like one of the album’s most socially acidic pieces. The song’s obsession with echo chambers, blame games, tunnel vision, and self-righteous mob logic fits the record’s broader diagnosis of a culture addicted to punishment. Puscifer are not simply wagging a finger at outrage culture; they are building a track that sounds like the machinery of that outrage. The rhythm lunges, retreats, and lunges again, carrying the spirit of post-punk aggression and industrial abrasion without losing the project’s sly theatricality.
“The Quiet Parts” may be the album’s most chilling political statement. Its central warning is simple: when people tell you who they are, believe them. The song is about power poisoning the self, zealots tugging strings, and the dangerous moment when formerly hidden intentions are no longer whispered but trumpeted. In another band’s hands, that could become a lecture. In Puscifer’s, it becomes a dark transmission, half sermon and half emergency broadcast.
“Mantastic” is where the record’s satire gets filthy, funny, and vicious. It skewers alpha-male posturing, vanity, grooming culture, inflated toughness, and the ridiculous theater of modern masculinity. Puscifer have always had room for absurd character work, and “Mantastic” sounds like a grotesque carnival mirror held up to men who confuse performance with strength. It is funny because it is stupid; it is effective because the stupidity is real.
“Pendulum” is one of the album’s most seductive darkwave moments. Mat Mitchell’s production turns the track into what Carina calls a gothy playground, with Fairlight atmosphere, bells, fuzz, and harmonies moving like smoke through a half-lit room. The repeated call for the pendulum to bring balance gives the song a ritualistic weight. Balance, in this context, does not sound gentle. It sounds like correction. It sounds like consequence arriving on schedule.
“ImpetuoUs” brings a different energy: reckless, danceable, defiant, and strangely celebratory. It speaks to the people who are not the same, who do not want to lead, move, or follow, but simply dance through the fear. Sarah Jones’s drumming gives the song a signature physicality, and the track becomes a kind of mutant anthem for the curious, the unpredictable, and the unafraid. On an album so focused on social decay and psychological overload, “ImpetuoUs” offers motion as resistance.
“Seven One” is the record’s numerological fever dream. With narration from Mr Ian Ross, bass from Tony Levin, and drums from Danny Carey, it feels like Puscifer opening a trapdoor into lecture, ritual, geometry, mystery, and cosmic comedy. The song’s fascination with the number seven, history, Shakespeare, celestial bodies, and deliberate human calculation fits the project’s habit of making the academic feel absurd and the absurd feel weirdly profound. It is not just a song; it is a strange little seminar inside the Pusciverse.
The album closes with “The Algorithm (Sessanta Live Mix),” and it could not be more appropriate. The song bows before the false god of attention addiction, dopamine loops, doomscrolling, reflection, and social-media obedience. Ending Normal Isn’t here makes the whole record feel like it has been circling the same idol from different angles. The algorithm is not merely a technological subject. It is a spiritual one. It is what people now feed, serve, fear, and mistake for reality.
What makes Normal Isn’t compelling is the way Puscifer merge commentary with feel. This is not protest music in the traditional sense, nor is it simply dark electronic rock with clever lyrics. It is a record about dysregulation that understands groove as both symptom and medicine. It is about bad wolves, bad actors, public stonings, quiet parts said aloud, pendulums, algorithms, and the daily battle not to lose one’s mind among people who seem thrilled to misplace theirs.
Maynard James Keenan remains the project’s wry oracle, but Normal Isn’t is unmistakably the work of a triad. Mat Mitchell’s production and instrumental architecture give the album its body: post-punk guitar bite, analog-synth smear, bass weight, and rhythmic unease. Carina Round brings dimension, wit, venom, and spectral elegance, often turning the songs from clever constructions into lived performances. The official album notes identify the core trio of Keenan, Mitchell, and Round while also highlighting contributions from Greg Edwards, Gunnar Olsen, and Sarah Jones, reinforcing how this version of Puscifer thrives as a strange, collaborative organism.
The result is a Puscifer album that feels less like an escape from the world than a distorted mirror held up to it. Goth meets punk. Comedy meets collapse. Guitars get sharper. Synths get stranger. The jokes get uglier because the world has earned them. Normal Isn’t is not normal, thankfully. It is agitated, stylish, sarcastic, wounded, danceable, and deeply aware that the current moment does not need another clean answer. It needs someone to observe, interpret, report, and maybe call a bunghole a bunghole while the pendulum swings.
For more information on PUSCIFER, visit:
www.puscifer.com
www.Facebook.com/PusciferMusic
www.X.com/Puscifer
www.Instagram.com/Puscifer
www.YouTube.com/PusciferDotcom
www.Spotify.com/Artist/Puscifer
