Bandcamp Two of the eight tracks are not named, they are located. The record opens at 52°30’11”N, 13°26’12”E, which is Berlin, where the band lives. It closes at 51°28′30″S, 73°6′11″W, a point in southern Patagonia. In case anyone misses it, track six is called “Ultima Esperanza”, which is the name of the province those southern coordinates fall in. Last hope, in the most literal reading available.
So the album is a journey with both ends pinned down, and the useful thing is that you can hear the pins without being told.
Those two bracket pieces measure nothing like the six tracks between them. Both sit far quieter than anything else here, both carry roughly double the distance between their softest and loudest moments, and both are dark, with barely any energy in the top register. The opener has no drum kit at all for most of its length, building instead on a plucked acoustic figure over a low drone before a deep spoken voice enters. The closer does the reverse, moving from reverb heavy clean guitar into the album’s last eruption.
The middle six are a different record: louder, tighter, mastered to a modern level and holding a narrower range. On a lesser album you would call that a failure of nerve. Here it reads as the point. The places you leave from and arrive at are quiet and wide; the travelling is compressed and loud.
That is a generous reading, and it is worth naming what it costs. “Belligerence” is the most tightly held thing on the record, and at nearly eleven minutes it is where the approach is most audible as a limitation rather than a choice. Across seventy minutes there is a stretch in the middle where the dynamics stop being an argument and start being a setting.
What makes the album land anyway is that it should not exist in this shape. Between 2022 and 2025 the band lost two thirds of its lineup. Robin Staps is the founding member still standing, with Mattias Hägerstrand on bass and Jordi Farré newly on drums, and Enrico Tiberi arriving as a second voice. A band that has been hollowed out that thoroughly usually makes a cautious record. This is a twelfth album with a seventeen minute centrepiece and two unnamed coordinates holding the doors open, which is the opposite of cautious.
Thorsten Quaeschning of Tangerine Dream contributes modular synthesizers, and it is a measure of how crowded the loud sections get that his work is easiest to hear in the quiet ones.
The sleeve is the most restrained thing the band has put out: three red circles stacked above a fan of thin lines on bare cream paper. It could be a figure with wings, a planet with moons, or a diagram of something rising. It refuses to settle, and for a record that names its start and end point but not what happens in between, that is exactly right.
The architecture is visible in the numbers. The two coordinate pieces that open and close the album sit far below everything else in level, carry roughly twice the range between their quiet and loud passages, and hold almost no energy in the top register, which fits an opener built on plucked acoustics and drone with no kit for most of its length. The six tracks between them are a consistent block: louder, brighter, mid weighted and considerably more tightly held, with “Belligerence” the most compressed thing here. “Milk Of My Dream” starts pulling back toward the darker end and works as the handover into the closer. Seventy minutes is a long time to spend in the compressed middle, but the frame around it is doing real work rather than decorating.
Standout tracks: Simulacra, Ultima Esperanza, 51°28′30″S 73°6′11″W
