Bandcamp For four albums, Naxatras were a vintage-analog heavy-psych band, all warm fuzz and cosmic drift. V is the sound of that band deciding to become something else. The Thessaloniki outfit’s fifth is a far more composed, modern and ambitious record than their reputation suggests, a cosmic prog voyage that trades the old amp-in-a-room haze for clean production, widescreen arrangements and, for the first time in earnest, sung melodies. It is a bold pivot, and it mostly pays off.
The scope is the draw. V moves fluidly across a lot of ground: the instrumental “Spacekeeper” and “Utopian Structures” push a sleek, riff-forward prog with synth pads filling the space a voice would hold, “Sand Halo” drifts into atmospheric gothic rock on a baritone croon, and the closing “The Citadel” builds a genuine post-rock crescendo out of intimate acoustic passages. Crucially the production keeps its dynamics, resisting the brickwall so the quiet-loud swings actually register, the guitars clean and legible, the stereo image wide and deep. When Naxatras let a theme build across a long runtime, the cosmic ambition of the old band is still very much alive in the new one.
What is lost in the trade is some of the warmth. The drums are edited and polished to the point of occasional sterility, that razor-precise modern kit sitting a little at odds with the human sprawl of the songs, and the low end can feel thinned out, wanting more of the sub-heavy push the heaviest moments reach for. And the stylistic reach, prog, post-rock, gothic, even a synthwave shimmer, means the record sometimes feels like several bands auditioning rather than one with a fixed identity. It is the growing pain of a group mid-transformation.
V is an ambitious, varied, genuinely engaging record from a band refusing to repeat themselves, and while it sands off some of the vintage charm that made their name, it opens a bigger, brighter room to move around in. Fans of the more composed, cosmic end of the psych-to-prog spectrum, the Causa Sui-goes-widescreen corner, will enjoy following them out there. Headphones on, eyes up.
A pivot record: clean, transparent, dynamic production replacing Naxatras’s old vintage haze, and it resists the brickwall so the quiet-loud swings register. The instrumental “Spacekeeper” and “Utopian Structures” run a sleek riff-forward prog with synth pads in the vocal’s place, “Sand Halo” drifts into gothic rock on a baritone croon, and “The Citadel” builds a post-rock crescendo from intimate acoustics, its one low-mid congestion around 250 to 400 Hz at full load. The guitars stay clean and legible, the stereo image wide and deep. The cost is warmth: the drums are edited nearly to sterility, the razor-precise modern kit at odds with the songs’ human sprawl, and the sub feels thinned where the heaviest moments want push. Ambitious and wide-ranging, sometimes to the point of sounding like several bands at once.
Standout tracks: The Citadel, Spacekeeper, Sand Halo
