There’s a moment early in “IMPERIAL,” the opening track of Unmaker, where the music stops being something you hear and starts being something you feel. The riff hasn’t changed, the tempo hasn’t shifted, but there’s a threshold you cross, pressure finding the edges of the room, and once you’re through it, the record doesn’t let go for the next forty minutes.
Unmaker is the third album by Copenhagen quartet LLNN, and it arrives fully formed, absolutely certain of what it wants to be. Victor Kaas handles guitar and vocals, Rasmus Furbo holds the bass, Rasmus G. Sejersen plays drums, and Ketil G. Sejersen operates the synthesisers, and it’s that last element that separates LLNN from the broader field of heavy music. The synths here aren’t decoration. They’re load-bearing. They emerged from an unusual process: recordings made at a blacksmith’s workshop, a circular metal saw captured on tape and then pulled apart and rebuilt in post-production until it no longer sounds like a saw, or like anything natural at all. What remains is something that feels like the hum of infrastructure, of systems operating just outside the range of human understanding.
“DESECRATOR” makes the case for the band’s economy. At four minutes and twelve seconds, it’s tight for a song of this weight, there’s no padding, no extended intro, just a riff that comes in already at full force and doesn’t apologise. “OBSIDIAN” immediately after is the slower, more deliberate counterpoint: the guitar and bass lock together and pull in opposite directions, while the synth layer shifts beneath them like plate tectonics. It’s the album’s most atmospheric moment, and its most patient.
The album’s midpoint belongs to “VAKUUM” and “SCION,” two shorter tracks, just over two minutes each, that function almost like palate cleansers, hard resets between the longer constructions that surround them. “VAKUUM” in particular strips almost everything away, leaving a minimal pulse and a sense of held breath before “SCION” comes back swinging.
“INTERLOPER” is the record’s pivot. Approaching five minutes, it gives the synths room to run alongside the guitars rather than beneath them, and the result is the album at its most cinematic, less a heavy song than a heavy scene, the kind of thing you’d expect to soundtrack something collapsing in slow motion. Then “DIVISION” tightens back up, and “FORGER” leans into a groove that might be the most physically immediate thing on the record.
The album closes with “TETHERS” and “RESURRECTION,” and the contrast is pointed. “TETHERS” is the longest track at six minutes, and the most emotionally exposed, there’s a fragility in the way it builds that the rest of the album mostly denies. By the time Kaas’s vocals come in, buried but audible, the song has accumulated enough weight that the final resolution lands with something close to relief. “RESURRECTION” follows at just over two minutes, a coda rather than a conclusion, sparse and unresolved, leaving the listener exactly where the title suggests: at some uncertain beginning.
Unmaker doesn’t do anything it doesn’t mean to. That kind of deliberate control, applied to music this heavy, is rarer than it should be.
Standout tracks: Imperial, Obsidian, Interloper, Tethers
