Style: Post-metal, blackened sludge, ambient (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Cult of Luna, Amenra, Neurosis
Country: France
Release date: 21 March 2025

Enthusiasm for progressive metal is actually a relentless pursuit of novelty. Music of this genre is diverse, transgressive, abrasive, but above all else, wonderfully strange. Through this lens, each stab at originality that a musician takes is commendable; even the most misguided of attempts are unilaterally positive contributions to the medium. Experimentation pushes boundaries. You know the old joke about how the first person to taste cow’s milk must have been really, really hungry? This is an accurate characterization of every prog critic.

Dear reader—I have tasted at the Frenchman’s udder. I have come to know the weird and wonderful. BÅKÜ’s SOMA is excellent. The “OPPOSITE” suite that constitutes this record’s five tracks is a darkly fun psychic exploration. Oftentimes the label of “experimental” is the dinner table stand-in for “it sounds like ass,” but SOMA is the rare album that both abounds and astounds with left-field surprises. It has a wholly unique tongue-print. Rather than try to capture this vibe with so many wafer-thin descriptors, I would like instead to strongly recommend a blind listen to anybody with the slightest predilection for post-metal. I treasured my time with this music.

Sonically, I interpreted SOMA as a collage of unconscious experiences. “Soma” is a Greek root word referring to the body or flesh (as well as the tranquilizing narcotic from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). Save for the occasional brain-in-a-jar, each listener to SOMA is bound by some corporeal form that has been subjected to impulses beyond their control. BÅKÜ casts a fearful mood over these impulses, as if they are intrusions on our somatic reality. Sleep, fear, panic, autonomic processes (thoughtless, like a breath or heartbeat), even natural death: these experiences are part and parcel of living with a human body. They exist in parallel (dare I say OPPOSITE) to our conscious actions and decisions—the control that we believe we have. I ask without disdain: what medium could be better suited to such themes than post-metal, the easiest metal subgenre with which to dissociate?

BÅKÜ demonstrates an astonishing mastery of their genre on this debut album—it is delightfully easy to get lost between the sounds of SOMA. I often think of the Apple Music description of ISIS’s seminal Oceanic: “Post-metal must be an ordeal.” Add a helping of lurching ambience and sludgy riffs and each track off SOMA sounds like a terrific tumble down ten flights of stairs, as later recalled on a morphine drip. A careful hand controls the chaos. Riffs are afforded the exact duration of a welcome stay, slip back to make room for new ideas, reintroduce themselves when appropriate. Some of them are incredibly catchy, too; this allows SOMA to exist in the valley between inviting and off-putting.

“OPPOSITE 1” explicitly states its purpose by sampling English-language medical advice: getting less than six hours of sleep at night will cause a breakdown of the body itself. “Lack of sleep will even erode the very fabric of biological life itself,” the voice forebodes, describing incidents of cancer, sinus disease, and the destruction of DNA before signing off with a tongue-in-cheek “I do hope you sleep well.” Here BÅKÜ gives us the musical equivalent of Rod Serling describing a time he had to get up early for work, then showing us half an hour of graphic combat footage. This passage consists of the only decipherable vocals on the record and sets the tone for what is to come: a picture of lived experience painted with violent ambience.

SOMA—to invoke another fictional drug—is a mélange. Every “OPPOSITE” introduces itself as an individual, separate soundscape. Contrast the world music and cultic hymnal chants that open “OPPOSITE 2” with the ASMR muttering and night sounds that open “OPPOSITE 4.” Synths (credited as oscillateurs) and samples are used liberally to build atmosphere. By the end of the record it is abundantly clear why the band needed three guitarists. BÅKÜ has a gripping fascination with guitar tones and effects that matches the chaotic and diverse energy of its more synthetic elements. The common element threading these songs together is the tortured vocal performance by Daniel Arnoux. “OPPOSITE 3” accompanies his screams with the faintest tinkling of ivories, and the production is so crisp that each catch in his voice can be heard. It is a genuinely affecting listen. SOMA puts both the agony and the theatricality of metal front and center—the atmosphere fits its genre like a glove.

Post-metal has given us vast, churning, meditative works. Cult of Luna’s Mariner, The Ocean’s Pelagial, ISIS’s seminal Panopticon—each is an auditory planetarium of its own making. “Live, Båkü’s strengths are multiplied tenfold,” reads the official description of SOMA on BÅKÜ’s Bandcamp page. “The concert becomes a hardcore pagan ceremony, a moment of shared trance, a collective waking dream…” Having never experienced a BÅKÜ concert even thirdhand, I can not attest to the accuracy of this claim. However, SOMA is so vivid that I am inclined to believe them. The album hints, if not outright demonstrates, that BÅKÜ are capable of writing a classic in the genre. If they bottled this sound, I would not drink it. I would bathe in it.

Recommended tracks: OPPOSITE 3, OPPOSITE 5
You may also like: The Salt Pale Collective, Sumac, Obscure Sphinx, Adrift, Old Man Gloom
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page

Label: Independent

BÅKÜ is:
– Daniel Arnoux: vocals, guitars, synthesizers, samples
– Mathieu Oriol: guitars
– Thomas Brochier: guitars
– Yoan Parison: bass
– David Esteves: drums

The post Review: BÅKÜ – SOMA appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: progressive metal, technical death metal, groove metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Gojira, Car Bomb, Slugdge, Anciients
Country: Costa Rica
Release date: 7 January 2025

Progressive metal just had a monster of a year, and Gojira reigned king. Very few acts in our genre have claimed a Grammy Award, and exactly one has played at the Olympics. If you were transfixed by “Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!)” and now find yourself among the newest legion of prog fans: welcome! Next, consider checking out Nostoc’s latest release, Rites of Passage. While their name might not loom quite so large as history’s most notable kaiju (in fact, nostoc is a type of single-celled algae), this Central American act’s house style of groovy death metal invokes the same infectious riffage and relentless energy that drew me to Gojira in the first place.

Rites of Passage follows Nostoc‘s 2017 effort, Ævum, which featured such titles as “The Anamnesic Voyage” and (Lord have mercy) “Saturnian Mindscope Introspection.” The band’s latest release dials back the song titling—at times to a Seinfeldian extent—but continues to embrace an atmosphere of esoteric horror fantasy. Gustavo Quirós’s exquisite album art features a brain creature surrounded by mysterious emblems. My wordless understanding of Rites of Passage is that each of the creature’s eight pictographs represents one of the eight “rites.” For example, the feather might refer to the ave de luz y oscuridad (or, “bird of light and darkness”) referenced in the Spanish-language passage of “Opus.” Drawing these connections was an engaging exercise that helped me dig into the album’s narrative. 

Rites of Passage is about a primordial force of nature reclaiming an Earth that humanity has stolen from it, identifying this creature through track titles (“War Mother,” “Legion,” “Healer”) or explaining its motives (“The Whole,” “The Cleanse”). There are multiple valid interpretations of the “Healer”—a forest spirit, a biomechanical hivemind, a visitor from beyond—but one truth is undeniable: it’s pretty pissed off. The messaging is aggressively environmentalist without taking the listener out of the album’s world

The metal itself is equally aggressive. Speaking of a force of nature: drummer Emanuel Calderon is the unsung hero of this record. The drumbeats are full and thunderous throughout, but also erratic, rarely settling into one pattern, a bold choice that pays off handsomely on repeated listens. The vocals largely employ a crispy snarl which is positively demonic without sounding tortured. Nostoc‘s “Opus” (not to be confused with Nospūn‘s Opus) features the most vocal styles, mixing guttural death growls with more blackened banshee-yelling, clean vocals layered atop them, a downright melodic Spanish-language section, and some bizarre cackling thrown in for good measure. The band’s willingness to be theatrical on this front elevates just about every song on the tracklist to being “at least interesting” if not outright “good.” 

Rites of Passage is varied and eccentric enough to be undeniable prog, but never strays so far from its headbanging roots to alienate the baseline metalhead. This is a veritable niche, but I would have liked to see some more work like “The Path.” This song is a full-on detour into reverberated, flowery instrumental, à la the interstitial tracks on earlier Baroness albums. The tranquil strumming of “The Path” offers a reprieve from the music’s violence and serves as an atmospheric trailhead into “The Cleanse.” This is because Nostoc, unlike their namesake cyanobacteria, barely stop to breathe at all throughout Rites of Passage‘s 47-minute runtime. 

The music oscillates wall-to-wall between ferocious and menacing. Some listeners will appreciate this—and it undeniably serves the album’s story and aesthetic—but the lack of audible “footholds” becomes noticeable in the back half of Rites of Passage, when the songs really start to run together. “Moons of Daath” is the worst offender here: an eight-minute wall of sound broken up by the occasional groovy riff or unusual scream. Even the excellent “Opus” feels a little too long to bear the weight of Nostoc‘s sound, an issue that emerges more broadly across Rites of Passage’s runtime. If you listen through Rites of Passage and follow only the drums, it is a loud, eclectic, and ultimately great listen; if you do the same with the strings, or the vocals, it is similarly pleasant; but in unison, the band does not amount to more than the sum of its parts. If “the strings” and “the drums” are dance partners, they are perfectly in step, but one never twirls the other. Additionally, the vocalists, though talented, never come soaring in on the wings of a tasty riff: sometimes they seem content to simply tell a tale on top of the instruments, all the while screaming because, “Hey, we’re playing death metal!”

Groove metal at the level of technicality that Nostoc demonstrate is a fascinating genre experiment. Creating music that is both virtuosic and melodic is a tall order for any musician. If you are an appreciator of, for example, Gorguts-flavored death metal, you might even find these two endeavours to be at odds with each other. Technical metal demands attention; catchy metal necessitates a pit. The task of the progressive musician is to carefully string these disparate elements together into a satisfying composition. It is an unenviable task. I don’t think that Nostoc have entirely stuck the landing here: they have undoubtedly, however, created something both interesting and enjoyable to listen to, and that is an achievement in itself. Sonically, Rites of Passage is a whale of an album. That whale just hasn’t found its wings quite yet. 

Recommended tracks: Legion, The Path, Opus
You may also like: Ahasver, The Gorge, Pull Down the Sun, Sanzu, Liverum
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page

Label: Independent

Nostoc is:
– David Miranda (guitars)
– Emanuel Calderon (drums)
– Seth Gonzalez (bass)
– Alberto Hernandez (guitars, new)
– Adriana Muñoz (vocals, new)
– Freddy Lopez (guitars/vocals, former)

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