Emptiness

Founded in Brussels in 1998, EMPTINESS have spent over two decades refusing the conventions of extreme music, moving through black and death metal, avant-garde experimentation, and claustrophobic minimalism to build a body of work that consistently resists genre enclosure. Nowhere Speaks is their seventh full-length and their most immersive statement yet, released through Season of Mist. Extreme music has always been drawn towards the dark side of artistic expression. This has often led to an ever escalating race of trying to push the boundaries by just becoming harder, faster, and somehow louder. EMPTINESS beg to differ and their new album makes abundantly clear just how far the Belgian explorers of the tenebrous are willing to go. 'Nowhere Speaks' descends into a dimension removed from all human trace, a place governed by its own silent logic, indifferent to the listener's presence and unconcerned with offering entry. Recorded almost entirely live in the studio after four years of preparation, the music carries the tension and physicality of performance taken to its absolute limit: dense, textured, and unrelenting in the way it closes in. Nowhere Speaks opens exactly where Nothing But The Whole (2014) ended, picking up mid-riff from that album's cult abrupt conclusion, and closes with its opening riff, forming a deliberate loop between the two records. After the distortion-free, French-language austerity of Vide (2021), the return to weight and intensity here is total.