Start with the language. The album is called Veuel — not a word, exactly, but close enough to feel like one you’ve forgotten. The tracks follow the same logic: Serpent is straightforward, then Derf, Trampel, Aloof, Ender, Pando, Transparant, Stevel, List, Frugaal. Almost-words. Frugal stretched into something else. Transparent misspelled with intent. A vocabulary Turpentine Valley invented for this record and this record alone.
It’s a small detail that explains everything about how this Scottish band on Ripcord Records approaches their craft. Veuel doesn’t try to communicate directly. It builds a world with its own grammar — close enough to familiar that you can navigate it, strange enough that you’re never entirely comfortable.
What the Music Does
Only two tracks were available ahead of the March 6th release: “Pando” and “List”. They’re enough.
“Pando” — named, presumably, after the massive aspen clonal colony in Utah, the heaviest organism on earth — earns the reference. It moves slowly, one root system at a time, guitar layers accruing until the whole thing has a weight that seems disproportionate to what you can actually identify happening. It’s the kind of track where you look up and realise five minutes have passed and you couldn’t tell you where they went. The riffs don’t resolve so much as shift, and the lack of resolution is the point.
“List” is the counterweight: faster, more driven, something that functions closer to a rock track in its bones even if the surrounding flesh is post-metal. It moves at a mid-tempo clip where “Pando” drags its feet, which keeps the album from becoming a single undifferentiated atmosphere. Turpentine Valley understand sequencing. These two tracks bracket completely different moods, and the implication is that the eight we haven’t heard occupy the space between them.
The Larger Picture
The track list suggests deliberate construction: “Serpent” as opener makes sense — coiling, slow-burn, setting terms. “Frugaal” closing things out suggests they end on something stripped back, considered. Veuel reads as an album that knows exactly what it’s doing and is unbothered by whether you follow immediately.
The production is dense without being claustrophobic. Guitar tones sit deep in the distortion, riffs felt more than heard as individual notes — but the low end is anchored enough to give it shape, and the guitars retain enough harmonic definition that you’re tracking riffs rather than just absorbing noise. It breathes, just not much. Which is, again, the point.
Pre-release previews are limited. Full verdict in March.
“Pando” moves at a deliberate crawl, unhurried, letting the weight settle — while “List” locks into a mid-tempo groove that keeps things from collapsing into drone. Tonally the guitars sit deep in the distortion: gain-heavy, but the notes still cut through. The bass weight is constant and physical. Almost no shimmer or air in the upper register — the mix is sealed tight, which gives everything that suffocating, close-quarters density that defines the genre at its best.
Standout tracks: Pando, List, Serpent