For the Innermost

Date: 29/11/2025 Place: Trondheim, Norway Since first releasing music under this name almost a decade ago, Nortfalke has managed to profile himself as one of the finest purveyors of dungeon synth out there. In fact, he's among the artists who got me hooked on the genre in the first place, owing to his reverence for atmosphere above all and his willingness to go beyond the habitual restrictions of the genre in the pursuit of true aural storytelling, with his impressive live p

Artist: Apocryphos & Penumbral Aethyr Album: The Erosion of Innocence Label: Cryo Chamber Release date: November 2025 2025 has blessed us with numerous collabs, but this latest one was exceptionally promising from the very moment it was announced. Apocryphos (currently the main project of Robert C. Kozletsky, also of Psychomanteum fame) and Penumbral Aethyr (the recently kickstarted side project by Nicolas van Meirhaeghe of the long-running Empusae ) are both dark ambient sta

Artist: Ethnea Nekron Album: Exo-Metempsychosis Label: Winter-Light Release date: September 2025 Maurizio Landini of Onasander is no stranger to collaborations (in fact, most of his discography consists of them), but this time around he didn't merely team up Daniel Ferreira of Kloob for a joint release; rather, the duo decided that the fruit of their joint work deserves a separate entity in its own right. Thus was spawned Ethnea Nekron, whose cryptic Ancient Greek name, whi

Artist: The Void Wanderer Album: Life Is Exhausting Label: Cryo Chamber Release date: September 2025 There has always been an inherent escapism to dark ambient, which is perhaps to be expected from a genre that does away with so many conventional features and elements of what people tend to call music . It takes a specifically attuned mind to be able to disconnect from the sensory overload of everyday life and search for stimuli in a minimalist sound form. That said, there ha

Artist: Vortex Album: Acéphale Label: Cyclic Law Release date: November 2025 The great thing about Vortex is that, unlike many other dark ambient artists, the project doesn't really have a signature sound . Over his almost 20-year-career, this German musician has never really produced two albums that sound very similar to each other, although one does start to clearly tell apart certain aspects of his work given sufficient exposure. While all of them are notable albums in the