The Salt Pale Collective - …and God Said Nothing

The Salt Pale Collective – …and God Said Nothing
Release Date: 31st July 2026
Label: Self Released
Bandcamp
Genre: All of them.
FFO: Blood Incantation, Cult of Luna, Neurosis, The Ocean.
Review By: Mark Young

The last one for the month, and on balance the hardest to get on with compared with the others from July, we have The Salt Pale Collective and their 2^nd full-length release …And God Said Nothing. In their own words, this is the bleak follow-up to the abyssal debut. In terms of attributing tags or labels (because we love a label) they are classed as experimental, doom, noise ambient, post-rock-hardcore-metal, sludge and for me, they skate in and around all of these. What they do is pull all of those different genres into individual moulds and then line them up for your consumption. This is music for those that approach from an open-minded perspective. Nothing is off the table and if its used it’s because they felt it made the song the best it can be. If you take the opening track, Raised aloft upon the horn of the celestial bull you could be forgiven for expecting an immediate detonation of noise, and you would be wrong. This is as cinematic an opening as you could find, until it’s time to go dark. The shift is seamless as it is devastating, and suddenly you are looking at a completely different proposition which grabs you and informs you in no uncertain terms that you aren’t in Kansas anymore.

The title track is monstrous, I think if you were to accurately describe it, I would suggest some form of aural tsunami. It sounds massive, and then they hit you with the clean choir like accompaniment, and it’s just mesmerizing. From two tracks in I know that I have a problem here, in how I’m going to properly do their work justice in words. I know that other bands have done the dual vocals, we know it’s nothing new. On here, it hits differently, and I can’t say why, it just does, please take my word for it. Even the closing moments are mint, the gradual slow down, the changes in approach just comes together to give you one of the songs of the year. It’s that good.

It’s a trick employed again on Our Pale Madonna, but not in a way that makes you weary of it. The extremes get dialled back, giving full reign to vocal arrangements that carry the song forward. This is where they leap between lanes, doing what fits but not settling for one way, and it’s a monumental 8 minutes spent in their company. Once you get locked in to how they do things, everything falls into place for you. As I’ve said, trying to do this justice is difficult, you want to avoid using hyperbole or grand statements and as you can see, I’m a bugger for those. The first three songs are as good as anything you will hear this year, in any genre. This is one of those albums where one song is worth admission, and here you get six. Litany for a dying Sun is next, bringing that super-sludge doom to the fore, with manic sax running amok whilst Ahoy! The black caskets goes for electronic weirdness in its opening moments. It all points to a completely unique way of doing what they do, something that maintains total heaviness with an approach I’ve not heard elsewhere. You can come back to this again and again and pick up something new each time you press play, it’s an absolute blinder of an album.