Five years is long enough to wonder if a band is still a band. Tarlung, the Vienna trio, did not dissolve. They came back in January 2026 with Axis Mundi, their follow-up to Architect, and they came back with something to say about the state of things, the noise, the pressure, the slow unraveling of a world that no longer knows which way is up.
The album opens with “Static Noise,” and it earns that title immediately. The guitars arrive low and wide, carrying a riff that feels less like an invitation than a condition of entry. Philipp Seiler’s vocals cut through without drama, there’s no showboating in how this band presents itself. The lyrics set the record’s central anxiety in plain terms: the constant feed of information, the optimization of everything, the way the noise has become so total that silence itself needs to be relearned. It’s a blunt opening, and it works because the band plays it straight.
The second track drops into something denser, a valley-deep dirge built around isolation and enclosure, walls closing in from every angle. Where “Static Noise” moved with direction, this one lingers in discomfort, the tempo dragging deliberately, the riff cycling until it feels inescapable. The third track, centered on the phrase “burning out,” is the record’s most immediate moment: tighter, slightly more urgent, the guitars snapping with a little more attack before settling back into the record’s dominant low-end gravity.
“Sea of Drowned Souls” is the album’s centerpiece, and the track that opens up the most space. Guest vocals from Thérèse Lanz and Casey Rogers add an unexpected texture, something more human and exposed against the surrounding weight. The song builds on a single image, mankind adrift in an endless dark tide, and it commits to that image completely. By the time the closing refrain locks in, it has the quality of something genuinely felt rather than constructed.
“Winged Demise” snaps the pace back with more aggression, the most direct the band gets on the whole record, before “Full Circle” arrives with its resigned inventory of history repeating. The back half of Axis Mundi carries the album’s political weight most explicitly: ancient patterns, cycles of war and loss, the exhaustion of watching it happen again. It never becomes a lecture. The riffs carry the argument more convincingly than the words alone could.
The closing title track is the record’s payoff. “Axis twists, and it turns / And the world it burns.” Eight tracks of accumulating tension resolving into that single image, the cosmic machine finally seizing. Lukas Haidinger’s production, recorded and mixed at DeepDeepPressure Studios, gives the whole record a density that rewards the listening at volume, bass forward, guitars with genuine low-end mass, drums that snap without losing body. Alex Eckman-Lawn’s artwork matches the sound exactly.
Tarlung didn’t come back with anything softened. Axis Mundi is patient, purposeful, and heavier than its predecessor, a record about the world cracking apart, made by a band that clearly spent five years watching it happen.
Standout tracks: Sea of Drowned Souls, Static Noise, Axis Mundi
