SKULLSTORM – Orbital Strain (2026)
Almost nothing in this album feels genuinely new.
The riffs are familiar. The guitar tones are familiar. The overall language is made of sounds, gestures and solutions that have been circulating through metal for decades. At almost every turn, there is a sense of recognition: we have been here before.
And yet it is a good record. Perhaps even because of that.
There is no particular effort to reinvent anything, no need to prove that every passage must contain an unexpected idea. The music moves through a vocabulary that is already established and does so with enough confidence to make familiarity feel less like a limitation than a quality.
Somehow it is relaxing. It is still heavy, distorted and energetic music. But it leaves a surprising amount of space around itself. The absence of vocals is crucial. There is nobody insisting on being heard, nobody imposing a personality, a story, a posture or an emotional script on the listener. With no human voice at the centre, the music becomes less intrusive. There is simply less human presence. That can be a relief.
The rhythm contributes to the same effect. It is direct and relatively simple, never unnecessarily complicated, but not static either. There are enough changes, shifts and small variations to keep the album moving without turning listening into work. You can follow it closely, or you can let it run. It does not demand constant attention, yet it rarely becomes dull.
This balance is probably the album’s greatest strength.
Every individual step is something already known. Every riff seems to come from an existing map. The production does not reveal some unexplored sonic continent. Nothing here radically alters the language of metal.
There are moments when novelty itself becomes exhausting. The permanent demand for reinvention, surprise, disruption and complexity can become just another form of noise. In strange and increasingly shitty times, a record like Orbital Strain can therefore feel unexpectedly appropriate.
It stays inside the comfort zone.
And maybe, right now, there is nothing wrong with that.
Nothing new. Still good. And, somehow, comforting.