Bandcamp Lantlôs started as black metal. That was, as the band’s own press copy notes, “a million years earlier.” Markus Skye, formerly Markus Siegenhort, formerly Herbst, has been shedding skins for the better part of a decade. Wildhund leaned into shoegaze and alternative rock. Nowhere in Between Forever, album number six, pushes further. Eleven tracks in 42 minutes, most of them under four, none of them screaming at you. If you came looking for tremolo picking and blast beats, you came to the wrong record. What you get instead is something harder to categorize and, for that reason, more interesting.
The album describes itself as “a spiritual trip into the glittering world of the Nineties, when everything seemed somehow easy and possible,” and that framing is both accurate and incomplete. “Daisies” opens with a mid-tempo groove, the guitars bright and cutting, the bass heavy enough to anchor things without dragging them down. It sounds like a band that grew up on Hum and Failure as much as Burzum, and in its heaviest moments, the layered distortion and glacial pacing recall Jesu’s weight filtered through pop songwriting. The production has a warmth to it that sits at odds with the song titles. “Solar Death” does not sound like solar death. It sounds like driving with the windows down through a landscape that used to be beautiful.
That tension is the album’s engine. Skye has talked about “a hollow plastic feeling” built into the record, “a foreboding shadow of darker times to come,” and you can hear it if you listen for the edges. The melodies are immediate, almost poppy, but something underneath them resists comfort. “Numb TV Superstar” has a hook that could live on alternative radio, but the texture around it is grainy and unsettled. “Ghost” moves slowly through a space that feels abandoned rather than open. The beauty is real, but it comes with a sell-by date stamped on the packaging.
Skye is the sole musician on this record, which means every layer is a decision rather than a negotiation. The guitar tones carry maximum saturation but are shaped for melody, not violence. The drums sit in a steady groove across the tracklist, never pushing into blast territory, always serving the song rather than the genre. “Clockworks” and “Planets” are the longest tracks and the ones where the arrangements get densest, with layered guitars building walls that sit closer to Jesu’s crushing shimmer than to anything in the black metal lineage.
“Windhunter” closes the album with a track that finally lets the darkness through. After ten songs of carefully constructed brightness, the finale pulls the curtain back just enough to remind you where Lantlôs came from. It does not return to black metal, but it acknowledges it. The effect is like the last scene of a film where the colour grading shifts and you realize the warmth was artificial all along.
The mix is bright with a pronounced spectral centroid in the upper mid-range, giving the guitars a cutting, present quality. Bass frequencies are substantial but balanced against the guitar work rather than dominating. The overall texture is heavily saturated, with a high zero-crossing rate indicating dense distortion throughout, though the mid-tempo pace and melodic focus keep it from feeling aggressive. Loudness is pushed to typical rock levels with moderate compression. The drum programming maintains a consistent, groove-oriented pattern with steady onset density. The high-frequency content (cymbals, air) is present but controlled, contributing to a polished, finished sound rather than a raw one.
Standout tracks: “Daisies” because it teaches you how to listen to the rest of the album in under three minutes. “Solar Death” for the most fully realized songwriting on the record, where the 90s alt-rock worship and the Jesu-weight coexist perfectly. “Windhunter” for the closing shift that recontextualizes everything before it.
Prophecy Productions calls Nowhere in Between Forever “a collection of hit songs,” and they are not wrong, but that undersells it. These are songs that sound like hits from a timeline where the 90s never ended and the darkness never arrived. Lantlôs know the darkness arrived. That knowledge is what makes the brightness worth trusting.
