Emptiness – Nowhere Speaks
Release Date: 17th July 2026
Label: Season of Mist
Bandcamp
Genre: Avant-garde, Death Metal, Atmospheric Black Metal, Sludge Metal.
FFO: Portal, Neurosis, Ulcerate, Oranssi Pazuzu, Deathspell Omega, Blut aus Nord.
Review By: Rick Farley
“Founded in Brussels in 1998, Emptiness has consistently explored darkness not as an aesthetic, but as a territory. Emerging from black and death metal, the band quickly moved beyond genre constraints, developing a sound rooted in experimentation, atmosphere, and transformation.”
Nowhere Speaks marks the bands seventh full length album and a welcomed return to a more aggressive death/black metal style, one that hasn’t been a part of their soundscape since 2014’s excellent Nothing But the Whole. After dipping into more ambient, post, industrial and goth elements on their last few albums and basically stripping their sound of its metal framework, it’s refreshing to have the band back at making grimy, gross atmospheric noise. It does feel like this album utilizes most elements from their entire discography all wrapped in one, which is good and bad at the same time. While it is rooted more in being distorted and dissonant rather than overly mellow, experimental ambience, it’s not quite to the brutal level of earlier works. I will say though there is an underlying nastiness present here that’s been missing from their sound in quite some time.
Nowhere Speaks is a tough one for me, simply because the record didn’t hit me as well as I thought it was going to. The dark melodies, dense atmosphere, and heaviness creeps around like a lumbering wall of fog, but it never quite reaches any real destination, the dynamics never feel fully fleshed out. There are massive amounts of atmosphere that feels sludgy as well as somehow soft and brightened at times that I wish would pass through to completion, several tracks often end abruptly leaving a sense of being incomplete. The songs that are good are really good, but several tracks meander around with little substance and at times feels like random instrumentals. More than a few times during this record I felt like I was listening to the same song over and over again.
The guitars tones are noisy and dense, while the low end pummels with its thudding, hammering aggression. The riffs feel loose and dissonant, often reaching swampy and entrancing, all while still being aggressive. The melody on Nowhere Speaks are light and eerie, while also being effective in adding to the spellbinding aspects of the record. The vocals are thick with airiness and are cavernous, sounding absolutely massive without a lot of tensed growling. They sound course but are shrouded in effects that it makes it tough to hear, it’s almost sounds like whispered harshness, if that even makes any sense. The right ears will more than likely love this, so I’m not saying this record is a failure. Obviously, the elements that didn’t work for me on this record, the band made a conscious decision about. It’s not like this is from a newer band that doesn’t know what they’re doing. It’s recorded well, textured and often crushing, having elements that are successful. However, compared to some other releases in the last few years from similar bands and some of the bands previous catalogue, this record just doesn’t stand out enough.
If Emptiness went deeper into any of its previous directions more focused and streamlined, I think the experience would be better for me, but sadly this feels like the band doesn’t want to let go of any of their elements, so the solution was to force them all together into one occasionally cohesive sound. As always, judge for yourself.
(3 / 5)
