Chicago's ANATOMY OF HABIT returns with the album Paired Sentinels!

Chicago’s ANATOMY OF HABIT returns with Paired Sentinels, set for release on July 31st. The entrancing new offering serves as the band’s fifth full‑length album and the third created by its longest‑running lineup. 

Since forming in 2008, the group has carved out a singular space at the intersection of post‑punk, doom metal, early industrial, noise‑rock, and shoegaze – an approach that critics have consistently described as immersive, genre‑resistant, and emotionally exacting. Across their catalog, reviewers have highlighted the band’s long‑form structures, patient intensity, and the way their music rewards deep, sustained listening.

 Paired Sentinels extends this trajectory. Following Even If It Takes A Lifetime (2021) and Black Openings (2023), Paired Sentinels stands as the culmination of the band’s most prolific and unified period. It is their most cohesive and their most vulnerable album, underscoring the group’s commitment to evolution and sustained creative intensity.

Written by Alex Latus (guitar), Isidro Reyes (metal percussion), Skyler Rowe (drums), Mark Solotroff (vocals and analog synth), and Sam Wagster (bass guitar and lap steel guitar), the album reflects a group whose internal chemistry has reached a rare equilibrium. This lineup’s interplay – refined over years of collaboration – shapes the album’s dynamic language: Latus’s shifting guitar constructions, Reyes’s metallic resonance and rhythmic abrasion, Rowe’s precise and intuitive drumming, Wagster’s grounding low end and spectral lap steel textures, and Solotroff’s commanding vocal presence and synth atmospheres.

Across its four tracks the album explores repetition, memory, identity, and the unstable structures that shape longing and loss. Solotroff’s lyrics move between stark observation and internal monologue, tracing cycles of obsession, dislocation, and renewal. The language is compressed, incantatory, and ritualistic, echoing the band’s longstanding interest in psychological excavation and the tension between interior and exterior worlds.

The cover features Untitled (Sedlec Ossuary) (2022) by artist Jeff Gibson, a layered montage of anatomical diagrams, urban structures, and reflective surfaces. Drawing its name from the Czech chapel famed for its bone architecture, the piece meditates on mortality, memory, and the aesthetics of decay. It serves as a fitting visual counterpart to Paired Sentinels – a record concerned with emotional thresholds, the erosion of identity, and the delicate frameworks that hold desire in place. Jonathan Canady, who has designed all of the band’s releases, returns once more to shape the album’s visual presentation.

 Musically, Paired Sentinels deepens the ensemble’s collective vocabulary. The compositions unfold with a sense of inevitability, balancing monolithic force with moments of openness and vulnerability. The result is a record that feels both meticulously constructed and emotionally raw – a testament to endurance, collaboration, and the ongoing search for meaning within sound.

 In advance of the record’s release, ANATOMY OF HABIT unveils stunning first single, “Always Arriving." 

Comments Solotroff, “Writing ‘Always Arriving’ felt like navigating a very specific temperament – that heavy, internal state where willpower starts to thin out and you find yourself leaning back into the past just to find your footing. There’s a tension in the song that carries the feeling of being perpetually in transit, always arriving but never quite touching the ground. Utilizing repetition in ANATOMY OF HABIT isn't about circling back to the start; it’s more like digging into the same patch of earth until you hit something archaic, something that feels like a foundational truth. This song is a study of what we leave behind, the traces and gestures that remain even when we feel out of step with everything around us. It’s a mute testimony, a quiet obsession that keeps building until it finally hits the reality of mortality. We’re left suspended there, caught between the weight of where we’ve been and the certainty of what’s coming.”

Stream / Buy / Download the album on Bandcamp

Recorded and mixed by Sanford Parker – marking the band’s fourth collaboration with the renowned producer – and mastered by Collin Jordan, Paired Sentinels bears the sonic clarity and weight that have become hallmarks of ANATOMY OF HABIT’s most focused era.

 Paired Sentinels will be released on LP, CD, cassette, and digital formats. The LP version will include a bonus 7-inch with two instrumental tracks, created by Solotroff using practice space recordings. The 7-inch tracks are exclusive to the LP version and will not be included with other formats.

In related news, Chicago’s Twelve Ten Gallery will host a special record release event celebrating Paired Sentinels on Saturday, July 18th from 6:00–9:00pm Central. The evening will begin with a conversation between ANATOMY OF HABIT’s vocalist, lyricist, and co-founder Mark Solotroff and Twelve Ten Gallery director Joshua Johnson, reflecting on the band's nearly two-decade history and the approach. The discussion will consider the conceptual and creative processes, influences, and collaborations that have shaped the group's practice.

Following the conversation, attendees will be invited to a listening session featuring selections from Paired Sentinels and the band's catalog, offering an opportunity to engage with ANATOMY OF HABIT's music through sustained listening. A public Q&A and informal reception will follow.

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Photo by © Anatomy of Habit