Collaborative albums in heavy music tend to go one of two ways: either the guest contributions dilute the host band’s identity until the record becomes a sampler, or the band uses the collaborations as a framework for something larger than they could make alone. Astral Sands, Novarupta’s record on Suicide Records, is firmly the second kind. Eight tracks, eight guests, eight different entry points into a sound that stays identifiably theirs throughout.
Novarupta play blackened sludge, the kind of heavy music that operates at the intersection of post-metal atmospherics, sludge’s low-end aggression, and black metal’s sense of cosmic scale. “Seven Collides” features Kristofer Åström, whose voice sits against the sludge with an unlikely elegance that shouldn’t work and absolutely does. “The Clay Keeps” brings in Mark Wilson-Pepper for the record’s most cinematic stretch, the guitar work expanding into something that feels genuinely spacious. “Cosmographia” closes the album with Fabian Brusk-Jahn, which is the right choice for a closing track, it ends the record somewhere vast and unresolved.
The album’s title opens it: “Ensamstående: Enastående” translates roughly from Swedish as “solitary: outstanding,” which is the kind of contradiction a record about isolation and collaboration earns the right to make. The opening track is the only one with no guest, which makes it both an artist statement and an invitation.
This is a dense record, the kind where individual instruments are sometimes more felt than heard, everything layering into a texture that the guests cut through in different ways. Guest vocalists clarify rather than adorn; they give the listener a point of entry into sections that might otherwise feel impenetrable. The production (on Suicide Records, a Swedish label with a track record for getting exactly this right) keeps the blackened elements from overwhelming the sludge foundation: the low end is heavy throughout, the black metal influence lives mostly in the treble register and in the song’s sense of scale rather than its tempo.
Standout tracks: Seven Collides, The Clay Keeps, Cosmographia
FFO: Ulcerate, White Ward, Year of No Light. Astral Sands is the record Novarupta has been building toward, collaborative without losing coherence, heavy without losing atmosphere. One of the more interesting albums to come out of the Swedish metal underground in 2025.
