Ingrina – Nåværende Lys
Release Date: 13th February 2026
Label: Medication Time Records/À Tant Rêver Du Roi
Bandcamp
Genre: Post-Metal, Atmospheric Post-Hardcore.
FFO: Year Of No Light, Cult Of Luna, Russian Circles, Bossk, Pothamus.
Review By: Pete Wall
French post-metal quintet Ingrina take the long view when approaching their work. Over almost a decade they’ve been working through a connected set of ideas, treating each release as part of a larger whole rather than a clean slate. New album Nåværende Lys is the final piece in a conceptual trinity with its predecessors Etter Lys and Siste Lys. Those records introduced a loose narrative built around pressure, restriction, and survival; life caught in systems it can’t control or evade. The details matter less than the direction of travel, and taken together, Etter Lys and Siste Lys felt like meditations on a decidedly uneasy state of being.
Nåværende Lys arrives as the release from constraint and, to some extent, from unease. It closes the trilogy by shifting focus from endurance to escape. Ingrida crafted the record as a collective over a four-year period, deliberately stepping away from outside interference and the pressure to pump out content. That decision shapes both how the record sounds and how it asks to be heard. Nåværende Lys is immersive, slow-moving, and tied to a specific internal logic that is both a strength and a weakness, given the level of buy-in required in order for its high-minded ideas to connect.
The sense of intended immersion is apparent from the outset. The three-guitar attack, underpinned by commanding bass and swirling drums, is thickly layered, almost to the point of saturation. The guitars blur into wide sheets of sound, rhythms push forward with weight, and the vocals sit low in the mix, more like another texture than a guiding presence. The effect is enveloping, sometimes impressively so, but it also means the album rarely pulls back. There’s very little air between moments, and that lack of space becomes noticeable the longer you sit with it.
That having been said, there are smart ideas threaded through the tracklist. Track titles seem to operate as pairs: opener Time is followed by Out, Loosen runs into Grips, and Laws expands into And All the Deadly Frontiers. On paper, the thematic throughline of the album couldn’t be clearer. In practice, that push and pull isn’t always reflected clearly in the arrangements. The album tells us that something is being broken open, but it doesn’t always let us feel the resistance first.
The drumming on Nåværende Lys is frequently the most immediately striking element. Swells build patiently, gathering momentum in a way that feels physical and deliberate. The frustration here is that those builds don’t always go anywhere meaningful. Peaks arrive, but without the sense of having travelled to reach them. Time is a good example, with it being a track that exists almost entirely in elevation with no real descent or rise to contextualise and enhance the experience. Without quieter moments or contemplative valleys, the impact fades faster than it should.
This ties into the album’s broader issue with scale. Nåværende Lys is constantly reaching for grandeur, for a sense of transcendence, but that scale is not consistently earned. The concept is profound and ripe for exploration, yet the music rarely dwells in fragility or uncertainty. As a result, the liberation it promises can feel abstract rather than hard-won. At times, the high-concept framing drifts toward pretentiousness, not because the ideas are empty, but because they’re scarcely challenged or complicated by the music itself.
In a crowded post-metal and post-rock landscape, Ingrina don’t fully succeed in setting themselves apart. The commitment to slowness and DIY process gives the album integrity, but sonically it leans on familiar gestures. They’re executed well enough, but not often in ways that feel unmistakably personal.
Nåværende Lys isn’t a bad record. It’s immersive, sincere, and clearly the product of patience and care. But for an album ostensibly about breaking free, it spends surprisingly little time articulating what it’s breaking away from. Worse still, although the initial rush is very real when the bars finally fall, the exhilaration of freedom never quite arrives.
(3 / 5)
