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…