“Pain is the cry of a soul that wants to go home.” – Graham Watson
In a world where extreme metal with a Christian message is still largely terra incognita, few could have predicted that one of the most honest, wrenching, and multi-layered albums of 2025 would come from a lone creator in Las Vegas known as Scapegoat.
The Suffering Season (Full Length Version), a project years in the making, is not just a collection of nine tracks—it's a testimony. A chronicle of spiritual warfare, confession at blast beat speed, and liturgy written in growls.
Graham “Scapegoat” Watson returns more than two decades after recording the original demo. This time, the remastered material reaches its full power, offering not just crushing riffs and growls, but a soul scorched like ash on Ash Wednesday.
You can’t talk about The Suffering Season without tracing its origins. This isn’t an ordinary album. It’s the result of years in which pain, conversion, and liturgical obsession intertwine with musical passion and incurable perfectionism.
The original version was recorded in 2001 as an EP, heard only by a handful of Scapegoat’s friends and some underground zines. As Watson himself admits:
“It was my confession. Too personal, too dirty, too real to show anyone. And yet… the only thing keeping me alive.”
After years of silence, struggles with addiction, reconversion, and spiritual rebuilding, Watson decided to revisit the material. He remastered it, added missing vocal lines, enriched the sound, and built a new, full narrative—based on the structure of the Christian liturgical year and Jewish days of atonement.
Each track corresponds to a specific moment in the spiritual calendar: Lent, Yom Kippur, Good Friday, Passover, Resurrection. But there are no joyful hallelujahs here—it's more a cry of despair and hope. Penance here is not a gesture—it’s agony.
Musically, The Suffering Season is a brutal amalgam: from Death and Morbid Angel, through Living Sacrifice, to Neurosis and early Slipknot. But this isn’t mimicry—it’s about reconstructing emotion through sound.
“Priests (Lent),” the second track, is a seven-minute manifesto of shame and resistance. The rhythm section lashes like a whip at a sinner, and Scapegoat’s growl sounds as if all of Sodom is roaring into the microphone. In contrast, “Deep Ascension (Passover),” a twelve-minute colossus, is a meditative journey through riffs, synths, and ambient hellscapes, where redemption battles nihilistic despair.
A curiosity are the female vocals (by Gracie 9 and SlayerChick), which aren’t decorative—they serve a liturgical function. In “Those Who Do Not (Good Friday)” we hear psalms chanted by a voice so cold and distant it seems to come from the world’s end.
Looking at the lyrics, this album is a spiritual narrative in nine acts. Each lyric is a monologue—sometimes to God, sometimes to a demon, sometimes to oneself.
In “Kettle of Fish,” Watson confronts his own faith’s hypocrisy:
“I wear the ashes of saints and the lies of my church / Salted and burned, yet still I kneel”
In “Destitute (Risen),” the album’s final track, you hear an almost gospel of death and resurrection:
“My hands still bleed, but I rise.
Not in glory, but in ruin,
And still He calls me son.”
This isn’t saccharine Christianity. This is street theology. The confession of a prisoner. A service at the bottom of an empty bottle.
In 2001, Graham Watson—then without the “Scapegoat” moniker—locked himself in a stifling, makeshift basement studio in Las Vegas, armed only with a TASCAM 8-track recorder. No one knew that something more than another tape-trading demo was being born. At the time, Watson was fresh out of rehab, recovering from a suicide attempt and, as he put it, “a little domestic apocalypse.”
“It wasn’t an album. It was a cry for help. I knew if I couldn’t transmute the suffering into something bigger—something I could leave behind—there just wouldn’t be anything left of me. Alive or dead.”
The early versions were tracked on an ancient Peavey, run through a kitchen mixer. Drum machines rattled like broken elevators in hell, and vocals—recorded in a closet under a blanket—were nearly inaudible.
But these raw flaws—those crackles, imperfections, and lo-fi grit—became the DNA of what would eventually bloom into “The Suffering Season (Full Length Version).”
After years of silence and aborted rejuvenation attempts, Graham Watson stumbled upon an old cassette. What he heard, he claims, sent a “spiritual shudder” through him.
With the help of a few friends—including sound engineer Jake de La Cruz and vocalist Gracie 9—Watson spent three years remastering, overdubbing missing parts, reconstructing lyrics, and even writing new tracks from scratch (“Wrong? (13th Step)” and “Deep Ascension (Passover)” among them).
All of this happened in his home studio, ironically dubbed Bleedinggoat Studios—a nod to his artistic persona, inspired by the biblical scapegoat.
“Instead of offering a goat, I decided I’d be the goat. I’d give everything I had—time, health, voice—to finish this.”
Today, Bleedinggoat Studios is a 4-by-3 meter room, its walls lined with salvaged comforters, a Samson mic from eBay, and a computer built from parts bought off a retired techno DJ. Yet, from this tiny hermitage emerged a sound as raw and spiritual as if Fenriz of Darkthrone ran a chapel.
Musically, “The Suffering Season” is much more than a scream of despair. It’s a carefully crafted liturgy in conceptual form, divided clearly into parts: Sin – Penance – Death – Purification – Resurrection.
Each song illustrates a stage of spiritual transformation, but never naively. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel—just a tunnel that runs through human sewage, an emotional bunker, and the wailing of a man who’s failed everyone and still tries to love God.
“Terra Hades (Yom Kippur)” is a case study in extreme penance—technically dense, with runaway riffs and lyrics written as a Yom Kippur prayer, whispered through… autotune. Yes, Watson experiments: where others go for a riff, he drops a passage from Leviticus in a synthetic voice. And it’s soul-shattering.
“I sinned knowingly, I sinned mechanically. And I return, not because I’m holy—but because I’m dying.”
You can’t talk about “The Suffering Season” without mentioning the vocalists: Gracie 9 and SlayerChick (their requested pseudonyms). Their contribution not only raises the album’s emotional stakes, but transforms it into something like a metal retreat.
Gracie 9, in “Destitute (Risen),” sings psalms in pure soprano—and in original Hebrew. SlayerChick, meanwhile, delivers a chorus in “Wrong? (13th Step)” as a phone conversation with the mother of a dead addict. This segment was recorded on an actual phone, using a dictaphone plugged into an old Nokia.
Watson makes no secret of his quest for brutal authenticity. No filters. No autotune, unless it’s part of the concept. “Either you say it hurts, or you say nothing,”
When the album dropped in April 2025 on Bandcamp and Amazon Music, reactions were… unpredictable. The Christian metal scene (yes, it exists!) split down the middle.
The portal HeavenlyHeadbangers called it “the most sacrilegious project in the history of spiritual metal.” Yet just a week later, Sanctified Death Zine dubbed it “a retreat in blast beat rhythm, more needed by the 21st-century Church than anything from the Vatican.”
On forums, comparisons cropped up to Trouble, Zao, Extol, even… Nick Cave. Some critics labeled Watson as “the Christian Maynard James Keenan,” and the album took on a life of its own—especially among recovery circles, AA groups, and musicians who’d been through addiction and spiritual reconstruction themselves.
“This album is a soul in pieces—but it shows you can pick up every piece and glue them back together. Even if the seams show,” wrote one RYM listener.
In reviews, emails, comments, and social forums, the same refrain emerges: "I never knew someone else felt this way."
🗨️ "Listening to ‘Priests (Lent),’ I felt like I was kneeling at the altar, screaming ‘Take me or heal me.’ After years of atheism, this album brought me back to prayer."
— “ShrapnelReborn,” Reddit
🗨️ "I’m not a Christian, but after ‘Deep Ascension’ I had to pull over and cry. Just cry."
— @rustcore_john, Twitter
🗨️ "My daughter died on Good Friday. For 4 years I couldn’t set foot in a church. Thanks to this record, I did. I don’t fully understand why, but I did."
— anonymous Bandcamp comment
There’s no room for fakery here. No one is promoting this album with advertising campaigns. It spreads by itself—like a contagion, or a whispered secret.
Watson isn’t a priest. He’s not a pastor. He never studied theology. Yet his lyrics and the album’s structure show deep knowledge of liturgy, sacred symbolism, and spiritual process. This is no accident—it’s deliberate, mystical craft.
Each of the nine tracks performs a distinct function in the structure of spiritual purification:
-
Kettle of Fish
Recognition of sin
Existential exorcism -
Priests (Lent)
Lent, priests
Penance and confrontation -
Wrong? (13th Step)
Addiction, AA’s 13th step
Cleansing of illusions -
Those Who Do Not
Good Friday, misunderstanding
Cry of abandonment -
Terra Hades
Yom Kippur, spiritual hell
Act of contrition -
Crumbs
Eucharist, gratitude
Humility before gifts -
Deep Ascension
Passover, escape from bondage
Spiritual ascent -
Resurrection
Easter, hope
Rebuilding the self -
Destitute (Risen)
The risen Christ
This isn’t random. It’s the structure of a retreat. Scapegoat doesn’t play concerts—he leads services. Instead of crowds, darkness. Instead of stage lights, a red recording lamp. But his church is growing.
Does “The Suffering Season” have a chance to join the canon of great Christian (or post-Christian) metal albums? Not commercially, but as a cult artifact—it’s already there.
Comparisons:
- The depth of Zao – “Liberate Te Ex Inferis”
- The experimentation and mysticism of Extol – “Synergy”
- The solitary agony of David Eugene Edwards – “Wovenhand”
- Theological reckoning of Believer – “Sanity Obscure”
- All with the DIY spirit of Burzum and the intimacy of Mount Eerie
Graham Watson may be the first Christian metal author to speak more of failure than victory. And that—paradoxically—makes his message far more convincing.
Watson, reluctant to discuss the future, revealed in a recent blog post:
“I’m halfway through writing the second album. It’ll be about hope. But before I get there—I have to die a little more.”
In an interview with the independent Memento Mori Metalcast podcast, he added that he dreams of collaborating with an Orthodox choir and that he’d like to “leave the house and play this album live—just once, even if it’s only a basement.”
“The Suffering Season” is an album that shouldn’t exist. And yet it does—and it’s thriving. It’s a cross nailed together from scraps of sound and words, driven into the heart of the 21st century.
It’s music for those who seek God and can’t find Him in church. For those who feel too dirty to sing hymns—but too alive to stay silent. For those who know that true repentance doesn’t shout “hallelujah,” but weeps in silence.
Graham Watson made more than a record. He made a testimony. And if the world won’t listen—so be it.
But those of us who have heard it, can never forget.