Six years is a long time. Long enough for a band to quietly dissolve, for a catalog to go from active to archival. Earth Ship did not dissolve. The Berlin trio, Jan Oberg on guitar and vocals, Sabine Oberg on bass, André Klein on drums, came back in August 2024 with Soar, their sixth album, and it sounds like a band who used the silence productively.
“Shallow” opens the record and announces immediately that nothing has softened. The guitars are the same thick, low-slung slabs the band built their reputation on, but there’s something more measured in how the song develops, less brute momentum, more deliberate control. The riff at its centre is the kind that takes a few bars to reveal itself fully, the kind that repays the wait. By the time the song locks into its final groove, the six-year gap feels justified rather than interrupted.
The title track sits second in the running order, an unusual choice, but it works. “Soar” as a song earns its name through accumulation rather than uplift, it builds slowly, the bass sitting forward in the mix in a way that gives the track a low centre of gravity even as the guitars push higher. It’s the album’s most dynamic moment, and the one that most clearly signals what kind of record this is going to be.
“Ghost Town” is the longest track at six and a half minutes, and the most willing to take its time. Where the earlier songs move with purpose, “Ghost Town” lingers, a long opening passage that doesn’t resolve into the main body of the song until nearly two minutes in. The patience pays off. Midway through there’s a tempo shift that the first half has been quietly building toward, and it hits with the kind of inevitability that only works when a band trusts the setup.
“Radiant” offers a brief pivot, tighter and more direct than anything around it, a three-and-a-half-minute demonstration that the band can write short. Then “Ethereal Limbo” and “Acrid Haze” carry the record through its middle ground, the former a slow meditation, the latter snapping back with more attack before “Bereft” and “Daze and Delights” bring the album home.
“Bereft” is the record’s emotional centre, five and a half minutes that carry more vulnerability than anything else here. Jan Oberg’s vocals are at their most exposed, the arrangement stripped back enough to make the riff feel like it’s carrying the full weight of the song. The closing “Daze and Delights” is looser, almost warm, a different kind of ending than you might expect, but a better one.
Jan Oberg produced, mixed, and mastered the record at Hidden Planet Studio in Berlin, and the result is a sound that fits the material exactly, guitars with enough low-end to feel genuinely heavy without collapsing into murk, bass loud enough to be a lead voice rather than a foundation, drums that crack without overwhelming. The mix rewards headphone listening in a way that live-room recordings sometimes don’t.
Standout tracks: Ghost Town, Soar, Bereft
Earth Ship didn’t come back smaller. Soar is the clearest, most confident record they’ve made, and proof that the six years away sharpened rather than dulled them.
