Watching from a Distance at 20: Warning's doom masterpiece was a folk record with the gain up

Twenty years is a long time to leave a record alone. Warning's Watching from a Distance came out in December 2006 on a tiny label called Miskatonic Foundation, made by a band from Harlow, Essex that most of the metal press had long since stopped covering. Then it did what cult records do. It got passed hand to hand until the hands ran out, and by the time anyone counted, Kerrang! had put it at number one on a list of the bleakest rock and metal albums ever made.

The reputation is earned. The genre tag is not, and Patrick Walker has spent the two decades since quietly proving it.

Five songs, fifty minutes, one subject

There are five tracks. The title song runs twelve minutes, "Bridges" eleven and a half, and nothing here is in any hurry. The tempos are doom tempos and the guitars sit low, but almost nothing else about the record belongs to the genre it got filed under. There is no occult imagery and nobody growls. There is a man with an ordinary, slightly cracked English voice singing about a relationship coming apart.

Plainness is the trick. Metal lyrics usually protect the singer behind metaphor, and Walker takes the protection away. Read cold, half of these lines look like things you would text someone at two in the morning and regret. Sung four times over a riff that refuses to resolve, they do damage that no amount of poetry would manage.

Compare the debut. The Strength to Dream arrived in 1999, also five songs, and it is recognisably a doom band: heavier, murkier, further inside the tradition. The gap between the two albums is the gap between a band playing a genre and a songwriter borrowing one.

The fifteen years that make the argument

Warning ended in 2009. Walker started 40 Watt Sun almost immediately and made four albums under that name, and what matters about them is the direction of travel. The Inside Room (2011) is still loud. Wider than the Sky (2016) is slower and cleaner, the overdrive dialled back to a warm hum. Perfect Light (2022) is largely voice, guitar, piano and brushed drums. By Little Weight (2024) there is barely any distortion left on the thing.

Nobody drifts that far in one direction by accident. Each record peels another layer of metal off music that never needed it, and nothing essential goes missing in the process. That is the strongest available evidence that the metal was never the load-bearing part. What people responded to in 2006 was the writing and the voice; the amplifiers were the delivery vehicle.

You can hear where it landed in other people's records. Pallbearer's Sorrow and Extinction (2012) has an entirely American sense of scale, and it still sounds like men who have played Watching from a Distance a great many times: the same commitment to melody, the same willingness to let a vocal sound exposed.

Strange kind of influence for an album that was, when it appeared, unfashionable in every available direction.

Rituals of Shame

There was one flicker in between. Warning reconvened to play the album in full at Roadburn in April 2017 and toured it, and the recording of that night came out as a live album in 2021. Then nothing again, until Walker sat down in January 2025 with no material and started writing.

Rituals of Shame was released on 19 June 2026 by Relapse, twenty years after the last one. Five songs again, about forty-five minutes again. Chris Fullard recorded it at The Arch Studio in Southport, a converted church roughly 140 years old, and Walker finished the lyrics somewhere outside Florence. He has cited Marillion and the English folk singer June Tabor as reference points, which will irritate a certain kind of listener and explain everything to another.

It is not a return to 2006, and it is not a 40 Watt Sun record with a distortion pedal in front of it. The songs run shorter on average than the ones on Watching from a Distance, and the shame in the title is more specific than the grief on the older album. Fifteen years of writing quietly appear to have made him more direct rather than less.

The tag is doing you a disservice

The tidy version of this story is that a cult record turned twenty and its author came back to mark the occasion. The truer version is that Warning and 40 Watt Sun have always been one project running at two volumes, and that Watching from a Distance sounds different, and better, once you know what Walker does when he takes the volume away.

File it under doom if RateYourMusic tells you to. Just do not let the tag pick your audience. This record works on people who have never willingly sat through a metal album in their lives, which is more than can be said for most of the slow and the heavy canon.

Rate the three Warning albums up there and tell me I have the folk record thing wrong. I would genuinely like to read the case.