A Final Embrace is the personal side project creation by Noah Thomas, a project he handles from the start to the finish. Every note, lyric, and layer of sound comes directly from him. It’s a vessel for translating his most personal experiences—grief, loss, and the fractured pieces of emotion—into music that feels both haunting and immersive, wrapping raw truth in atmospheric intensity.
When you put on Inside of a Burned Dream, the debut release from A Final Embrace, you don’t just hear music—you’re dropped into a memory that’s already half-burned away, still smouldering with pain. It’s a short record—three tracks, nine minutes total—but it leaves an aftertaste that lingers longer than some full-length albums.
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From the first seconds, it’s clear this isn’t an album that wants to entertain so much as to confront. The sound is thick with tension, vocals coming in like raw nerve endings, never softened or sweetened. Instead of chasing perfect melodies, the project seems to aim for perfect honesty—an honesty so blunt it borders on uncomfortable. And yet, that discomfort is exactly where its power lies.
What struck me most wasn’t the aggression or even the heaviness—it was the vulnerability beneath it. This is music born from lived pain, not just performed pain. You can feel that in the way the instruments breathe, in the way the vocals don’t shy away from breaking or screaming when the weight gets too much. The songs don’t unfold so much as bleed out.
There’s a sense that each track is a different room in the same burned-down house. The first track feels like stepping into the ruins—still hot, still dangerous. The second track pulls you into the personal—into a place where loss is tangible, where even the sound of a hospital monitor can hit like a punch. And the last track… the last track feels like the collapse after holding yourself together for too long, when everything you’ve been bracing for finally lands on you.
One of the most striking things about Inside of a Burned Dream is how it balances chaos with control. It’s easy for music this intense to spill over into pure noise, but here, every scream, every drop in volume, every swell of instrumentation feels deliberate. There’s a pacing to the madness—like someone carefully deciding which memories to show you and which to keep hidden.
Listening to it, I found myself thinking less about genre and more about experience. Sure, you can call it heavy, emotional, or experimental, but that doesn’t really capture it. This isn’t a collection of songs, it’s an emotional document. It’s the kind of record you don’t just play in the background; you sit with it, and it sits with you, maybe even uncomfortably so.
What makes it stick isn’t just the sound, but the way it trusts you to feel without explaining everything. The lyrics doesn’t hold your hand; the production doesn’t soften the blow. You’re given fragments—of grief, of memory, of conversations—and you’re left to piece together the full story yourself. That trust between artist and listener is rare, and it makes the record feel strangely intimate despite its anger.
When it’s over, you’re left in silence that feels heavier than before. Not because the music has drained you, but because it’s awakened something. You start thinking about your own burned dreams, your own losses, and how they’ve shaped you. That’s the quiet brilliance of this debut—it doesn’t just tell you about the pain, it reminds you of your own.
For a first release, Inside of a Burned Dream makes a statement without compromise. Noah Thomas isn’t interested in pleasing everyone, and the EP is stronger for it. This is music for those willing to sit in discomfort, for those who understand that beauty and pain often share the same space. In just three tracks, Noah Thomas has created something that doesn’t just demand to be heard—it demands to be felt.