Moloken - Moloken - Metal Epidemic

Moloken – Moloken
Release Date: 25th September 2026
Label: Discouraged Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Doom, Death Metal, Sludge, Post-Metal, Progressive Metal.
FFO: Fane, Oaken, Grava, The Old Wind, Mastodon, Cult Of Luna.
Review By: Mark Young

And now the last for the month, with the 5^th Album from Moloken who have returned to bewitch and befuddle in equal measure. With a number of genre influences that suggest that we should expect big riffs and expansive arrangements to match, they wrong-foot us a little with the short intro track The Burden of Our Awareness which felt to me that it had the body and idea to go further than it did.

I think it’s the first time I’ve said that about any band, but it does say a lot about them that they don’t want to do what you think they should, as they execute their first piece of weapons-grade metal with Eternal Sleep. It just blows up after an extended first minute or so, throat-shredding vocals and the kind of pounding drums that continually push forward. That blast is repeated again as it takes another step forward in expanding the sound around it, the sonic footprint increasing to suit. The thing to note is that they are able to fill its duration with all number of ideas that work within the context of the song; nothing stands out as being out of place; it’s all meant to be there.

That theme repeats as you make your way through the remainder of the songs too. That textbook drum clinic remains at its high level as we drop into 21.12.21, once again providing that solid backbone which allows everything else to spring forward.

The addition of cleans to Fault Line, backed off by a melodic line, takes you by surprise. It’s expected that we will soon enter a heavier arena, but it’s a glimpse of something beyond the extreme that they can offer. That quiet/loud dynamic is examined further within the song, but if you imagine the quiet, it feels like it’s just about hanging on for life. I know we have quiet/loud everywhere, but sometimes a band does it and somehow makes it new and exciting. It’s in the melodic where they somehow manage to throw discord in there, the guitar lines of En Lek Med Döden being an example of this. It’s like the sound of decay captured on tape, and I know I complain about instrumentals generally; there is something engrossing about this, but what it does do is lead us nicely into the last act.

A Night Vision Revealed (Asterion, Pt 1) combines the cleans once more with jagged shards of that deliciously uneven melody lines that have been in place right through. Compared to the others, it is unsettled and not as ‘smooth’, which seems to be their intent from the off. It caps a very strong album, one that draws from a variety of genres without ever sounding indebted to any of them. Everything is filtered through Moloken’s own strange and distinctive lens.