���Although IRM had a nearly decade long run of albums on the iconic Swedish label Cold Meat, it has become more difficult to merely describe this Swedish trio's music as merely "death industrial". While the core duo of Erik Jarl and Martin Bladh have certainly based their cold, threatening soundscapes in an aesthetic that will be familiar to fans of the likes of Brighter Death Now, IRM's albums have continued to head in more experimental and often more musical directions. Since the core duo of Bladh and Jarl was joined by bassist Mikael Oretoft in 2007, their music has come to embrace melody and song structure in a manner not usually seen in power electronics/death industrial groups; you might recognize Oretoft as the bassist for gloom-metal legends Katatonia on their classic album Discouraged Ones, and his presence has brought a tangible heaviness to IRM's sound that is a larg part of what has made their recent works so unique. Part of an apparent trilogy of releases that included the 2008 EP Indications of Nigredo and the 2010 album Order4, Closure... expands beyond those stylistic parameters of the classic Swedish death industrial sound, turning into something heavier and stranger with these nine tracks.

���As the disc opens, "Closure I" emits a heaving sonic nightmare of paranoid howling vocals and distant kettledrums that reverberate across a swarming hive of squealing mechanical noise; as the sounds of distorted breathing intermingle with sickly, keening drones, this first track introduces the album with the feverish intensity of a waking nightmare, and it's possessed with a lumbering power that could almost pass for a doom metal track, if someone were only to drop in a few extra distorted guitars into the mix. The vocals are disturbing, a mix of processed moans and those weird, demonically distorted cries, which lurk amid the washes of muted orchestral majesty that rise out of the murk, colliding with buzzing flystruck drones and grimy electronics throughout the album. Bits of haunting spoken word monologue are recited over hushed, funerary melodies, cold surrealistic prose-poems drawn from the same spare imagery as the lyrics (which are somewhat reminiscent of Dennis Cooper's austere, chilling psychosexual imagery), images of sudden violence and mutilation and voyeurism met with distant sobs of anguish and swells of oceanic noise and the tinny innocence a child's music box. It then slips into sparse death-dirges constructed from booming percussion and doom-laden horns, syncopated nightmare marches dragging lengths of rusted chain and surrounded by the icy whirr of prayer bowls, accompanied by the monstrous groan of a distorted cello and the diseased wheezing of harmonium, then slip into flat line sine waves and distant pneumatic rhythms and jittery, crushing synthesizers. All of this slowly builds to the unnervingly cinematic power of the last few tracks, which begin to pulse with a minimal, dread-filled energy akin to a John Carpenter score, riddled with blasts of excoriating, noisy chaos before it finally culminates with the withered, glitch-sore dirge of "Closure IX". There are some powerfully unsettling, even nightmarish moments that recur throughout the album, some of which come from the tortured shriek of the cello provided by guest musician Joanna Quail, who leaves bloody, jagged tears across a handful of songs. Hellishly abrasive at times, but Closure... also has a twisted, wretched beauty in parts that make this one of IRM's strongest albums to date. Fantastic album design, too, the digipack and sixteen-page booklet illustrated with scenes from some grim shadowplay that make a perfect pairing with IRM's starkly nihilistic dirges.