Good things come in threes with Monosphere.
Nearly three years after their last album, the band led by Kevin Ernst (vocals), Max Rossol (guitar), Valentin Noack (guitar), Marlon Palm (bass), and Rodney Fuchs (drums) enters a new era with their third album, Amnesia.
Collapse hits us right in the face, offering a highly energetic blend of modernity, heaviness, and a few dissonant elements as the vocalist roars, along with sharper Metalcore touches and distinct prog roots, whether in the intricate patterns or the syncopated riffs. We naturally move on to Anomia, which stays in the same vein, adding much more oppressive, shrill harmonics that complement the track’s aggression, but it fades out quickly enough to make way for Nadir, where the band returns to a progressive approach, inviting Despite Exile to join them. While this track easily ranks among the band’s most violent, it is nonetheless well crafted, with a rather heavy atmosphere counterbalanced by more ethereal keyboards, before the intriguing Allusion offers us a mysterious interlude to pause before Limbic hits us. The controlled eruption is highly effective, almost anchoring the track in Djent with its jerky mosh parts, then the band lets us breathe again with Idiomorph, blending clean vocals, soaring tones, and fairly gentle elements while giving distortion a key role to intensify the contrast. The track flows quite well but eventually sinks into silence before bursting into flames with Zenith and its furious rhythm, which allows itself very few breaks and remains mainly focused on violence and its changing forms, like the bass break that eventually turns into a haunting passage. There’s a ghostly, cybernetic touch on Engram, a fairly minimalist interlude where clean vocals dominate at first, then give way to distant screams that build in intensity on Dissolve, the final track—highly theatrical thanks to its orchestrations—which also features Mark Garrett (Kardavox Academy, Kardashev) to reinforce the vocal assault, while allowing the musicians to push themselves to make the nearly ten minutes captivating.
Although his two previous albums were already highly polished, Monosphere has reached the pinnacle of its art on Amnesia, skillfully blending all his influences to seamlessly link bursts of violence with much softer passages.
90/100
