Claws of pleasure graze the muted air
Unrepeated silence everywhere
Beneath the withering body wrapped in lace
A sandstone a painting of grace
There is a hush in The Morning…a hush thick with ash and grace. Ritual Howls have long inhabited the liminal spaces between decay and beauty, but here they arrive at something more elemental: the silence that follows collapse. The Detroit trio has always been fluent in the grammar of ruin, yet this song, with its slow and solemn pulse, feels like an elegy sung into the first pale light after a night of unspoken grief.
The play on “mourning” is unavoidable, and deliberate. The Morning (from their latest album Ruin) is a reckoning; a daybreak heavy with ghosts. Over a measured drum machine and bassline that thrums like a faint heartbeat under rubble, the lyrics unfold as fragments of ritual and remembrance. The vocals are both weary and devotional, describing gestures that sound like liturgy: swallowing the dawn, devouring the daybreak, thinking of the things the lost will “no longer do.” It is grief transmuted into rhythm; sorrow turned into sacrament.
The accompanying video, directed by Mïïgun and Julia Solis, transforms this lament into a visual rite. A woman (played by Iman) wanders through a garden that seems to exist at the edge of memory: lush, fevered, and already fading. She picks flowers as if salvaging beauty from extinction. Between these moments, we see desolation: gutted buildings, silent corridors, the skeletal remains of a city that could well be Detroit itself, or the mind after loss. She moves between these realms, the blooming and the broken, until the distinction between them erodes.
In the film’s most affecting sequence, she arranges an ofrenda upon a junked car, a shrine born of industrial debris and devotion. Here, The Morning becomes a portrait of ritual as survival, how one honors the dead by rebuilding meaning from the wreckage. Julia Solis’s photo composites, coupled with David Meiklejohn’s editing, give the video a dreamlike continuity: reality flickers between life and afterlife, grief and growth.
Filmed across We Feed This Mortal Coil and Bloomtown Detroit, the setting itself feels like an argument: nature clawing back the carcass of the machine age. It’s a fitting stage for Ritual Howls, whose music has always carried the echo of empty factories and the pulse of something still human within.
Watch the video for “The Morning” below:
The Morning is less a song than a state of being: the fragile moment when mourning becomes morning; dawn springs from death – for all its cruelty, it allows the faintest return of light.
Listen to The Morning below and order Ruin here.
Follow Ritual Howls:
Or via: