Pittsburgh death metal quartet Ritual Mass is “not interested in having a good time”

Ritual Mass isn’t here to have fun. If you want your death metal to be a soundtrack for swilling beers, throwing up the horns, and knocking your buddies around in the pit, then the Pittsburgh quartet isn’t for you.

“There’s nothing wrong with being the band that gets everybody together at the local bar to drink beers, hang out, and have a good time,” bassist-vocalist Neal Dudash tells City Paper. “We’re not interested in having a good time with our music. This is not a band for partying.”

Ritual Mass’s songs evoke mental torment, ambient dread, and crippling anxiety. Their long-awaited debut album, out now via 20 Buck Spin, is called Cascading Misery, and it’s a soul-wrecking affair that convulses in anguish, churns in agony, and languishes in a spiritual desolation that makes you want to pour out your beer and walk aimlessly into the woods, never to be heard from again.

Ritual Mass themselves have answered the beckoning call of isolation that their music seems to emit. Their public presentation is shrouded in mystery: only initials in the credits, no visible band photos, very little online promotional presence. They feel very disconnected from the Pittsburgh metal scene, and can’t name a single active band anywhere in the world who they’d like to be compared to. Cascading Misery was forged in seclusion over the course of four years, and while the album is finally seeing the light of day nearly a decade after Ritual Mass formed their band, the group of perfectionist misanthropes could’ve kept chiseling away at it in perpetuity.

“I consider our band to be, in essence, an art project,” says guitarist Phil Trona, who also operates the Pyre Press merch printing company in Mt. Oliver. “And I think an art project is never sincerely completed.”

In the era of two-year album cycles, short-form video content, and bands capitalizing on the familiarity of nostalgia, it’s refreshing that a band like Ritual Mass is marching to the blastbeat of their own drum. Trona and Dudash, both in their mid 30s, moved to Pittsburgh in the late 2000s and began religiously attending shows at the Mr. Roboto Project back when the Garfield venue was still based in Wilkinsburg and served as the region’s hub for underground extreme music. The pair have been playing in bands together since meeting in 2011, but it’s Ritual Mass — rounded out by guitarist Rick Mauck and drummer Greg Austin — that’s consumed the majority of their creative partnerships.

Unlike some bands who operate with an intuitive spontaneity, every move Ritual Mass has made since forming the band in 2016 has been meticulously planned in accordance with their greater artistic vision. Compared to their primitive 2017 demo and gnarled 2019 EP Abhorred in the Eyes of God, the doomy, atmospheric Cascading Misery is their most elaborate release thus far. “Everything that happens on the record is intentional,” Trona underscores. “Every word, every note, every visual.”

The resulting album sounds purposeful and detailed without succumbing to the fussy tropes of a pointed genre exercise. Ritual Mass isn’t interested in pulling from the sound of a specific demo or conforming to any particular regional flair. In fact, they aim to sound as singular and unmoored from prevailing death-metal trends as they possibly can.

“We don’t want to re-write Morbid Angel riffs,” Trona emphasizes. “We don’t want to have the same album art as Cannibal Corpse. It’s been done, and it’s been done better.”

Instead of trying to refurbish what their ancestors have already achieved, Ritual Mass are hyper-focused on channeling “the darkest feeling, the darkest atmosphere” that they can think up. A more esoteric, though no less potent, method of songwriting than piecing together an assortment of sick breakdowns and hellacious riffs. That would be too fun for Ritual Mass. Ritual Mass doesn’t like fun.

“It’s more about evoking a feeling of dread, anxiety, fear than it is latching onto the conventional things that make death metal ‘evil’ or ‘scary,’” Trona explains.

Cascading Misery is thematically inspired by Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1976 novel The Demon, a book about the unraveling of a man’s psyche. Dudash, Ritual Mass’s lyricist, wanted the album to channel that “descent into madness” from every angle: musically, lyrically, and visually. The foreboding album art, painted by Trona, conveys the abstract, sinister uncoupling from reality that Ritual Mass were trying to get across.

However, for as oblique as Cascading Misery is on its surface, so much of the album’s brooding feeling is inspired by very raw, very tactile realities. Specifically, how it feels to be alive in an era of livestreamed atrocities and the collapse of democracy around the globe.

“The first single we put out, ‘Immeasurable Hell,’ is very cryptically a pro-Palestinian song,” Dudash explains. “It’s about waking up in a world where thousands of children are being slaughtered, and we’re watching it on our phone every day, and there’s nothing anyone can do. The powers that be tell you that you must watch these children die in service of a greater thing.”

Ritual Mass doesn’t have a set political agenda, but to the band, topics like genocide are so pervasive that of course they’d make their way into an album as cosmically dark as Cascading Misery.

“The basis of death metal and black metal is to shine a light on things that are inherently evil,” Trona says. “What’s more evil, sinister, and extreme than living in society in 2025?”

There’s a rich history of death metal bands conjuring evil in Pittsburgh, but Ritual Mass don’t see themselves as part of that lineage. They’re “deeply unconcerned” with honoring any kind of regional identity, and while they personally have many friends in the city’s present-day scene, they don’t feel that Ritual Mass fits into the 412’s death-metal zeitgeist and have zero interest in putting the city on their backs.

“This band is more dedicated to the underground in general than Pittsburgh’s underground,” Dudash says.

Trona elaborates: “If people want to embrace us here, that’s great, and I welcome it. If not, then so be it. We’re doing this because this is what we want to do, not because we want to fit into anything.”

After spending an hour casting themselves as proud isolations, the band laugh at the irony of how excited they are for their local-centric album release show. On Oct. 2 at Brillobox, Ritual Mass will celebrate Cascading Misery with a mixed bill that includes hardcore crushers Pain Clinic, OSDM brutalists Extortion Cellar, and noisy industrialists Hand & Knee. On the one hand, it’s an excellent showcase for Pittsburgh extreme music. On the other, the eclectic lineup is a testament to one of Ritual Mass’s core theses.

“The thing I’ve always been drawn to with any kind of extreme music — it’s for outsiders,” Trona says. “I want Ritual Mass to be for outsiders, and that knows no geographical limit.”

This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2025.