Review: Chromascope - Hymns to Condemnation and Isolation

Artist: Chromascope

Album: Hymns to Condemnation and Isolation

Label: Self-released

Release date: August 2026

My favourite thing about music is discovering something new and fresh in a genre that has existed for decades, and is therefore prey to repetition and dullness. My second favourite thing is discovering something old, from before genre conventions became a thing, where creativity was allowed to run amok and little importance was given to the correct way of doing things. A couple of months ago, one release landed in my inbox that, I was soon to discover, somehow manages to do both.

Chromascope is a relatively unknown dark ambient entity hailing from Asheville, North Carolina (which I had the fortune of visiting four years ago, but that story is best saved for if I ever start a travel blog rather than a dark ambient one) and the brainchild of a certain Brandon Malzahn, who, as far as I'm aware, only put out one album under this name in 2019 before withdrawing into relative obscurity until now. What separated Chromascope from the bunch of other releases that land in my inbox every month and immediately drew me to the album is how much the cover art draws from the good old Cold Meat Industry days: a seemingly pedestrian image of destruction and desolation, with the project name on top and the album name on the bottom, with a Gothic font thrown in for good measure. The album's name makes the intent here abundantly clear - if you're after feel-good, background listening kind of dark ambient, looks elsewhere. That's not where the CMI parallels end, either, since the tracks are a delectable combination of harsher industrial-influenced passages and more classic dark ambient tendencies from the 1990s built around field recordings, droning loops, and overall a vaguely hostile soundscape that simultaneously inspires both awe and dread. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to write off Hymns to Condemnation and Isolation as a mere rehashing of the forefathers; this is not just an aping of the sound so many of us are nostalgic after, and is better described as a return to the roots in the sense of adopting a similar outlook and approach to constructing the atmosphere, an impression reinforced by none-too-subtle track titles. The tracks actually appear longer than they are, not because they are monotonous, but because they use repetition to induce a trance-like state and transport the listener into the bleak, desolate landscape being portrayed, which Chromascope utterly excels at.

Objectively speaking, this is one of those albums that manages to execute its intent very well without actually bringing many new or inspiring elements to the table. At the same time, it's one of those albums that can't be reduced merely to its objective qualities (if such a thing even exists in the realm of dark ambient), and instead needs to be considered from its temporal context. It draws on many long-forgotten facets of what originally made this genre such a force, and that alone elevates it above most accidental latter-day dark ambient. Therefore, more than anything, think of it as a treat.

Rating: 8/10