Review: Kloob - Iter ad Psychen

Artist: Kloob

Album: Iter ad Psychen

Label: Dark Odyssey Records

Release date: October 2026

I love the Scandinavian dark ambient scene as much as the next guy, but I love even more when quality dark ambient comes from corners of the world not usually associated with the genre, nor with the gloomy, wintry, wind-ridden landscapes of the Great North. One such example is Kloob, the brainchild of the talented Spanish musician Daniel Ferreira, who first came across my radar owing to his series of collaborations with the Italian master Onasander. Curiously, I haven't had the opportunity to review any of his work thus far, so Dark Odyssey dropping his latest album in my inbox several weeks ago was an ideally timed reminder to do just that.

The single greatest thing about Kloob is that he draws inspiration from the early 2000s dark ambient of the Nordic strain while also being unapologetically modern, both in his choice of aesthetics and in his songwriting approach, a feature that makes his work resonate both with jaded old farts such as myself and the younger audiences who got into dark ambient via labels such as Cryo Chamber. The above is evident throughout the duration of Iter ad Psychen (Latin for journey to the psyche), a deep, thickly layered piece of modern dark ambient that takes everything that was great about early Cyclic Law releases and expands it to a greater, more colourful scale. While his songwriting as such is not hugely original, Kloob knows how to use dynamics to great effect, being quiet (see Transcendent Frequencies) or loud (see Deep Psyche's Flow) when the music requires it, as well as slowly building up barely perceptible crescendoes that make Iter ad Psychen positively drip with atmosphere. While the music depicts movement on a cosmic scale, it somehow manages to remain intensely personal, inviting the listener to introspection rather than the envisioning of stellar bodies or celestial phenomena. Indeed, the album moves on the space-time axis rather than simply covering large distances, and Kloob doesn't hesitate to reach for unusual tools (for dark ambient standards) such as synths, dissonance, and electronica-driven rhythms to complete his visions, a fact particularly noticeable on the second half of the album. The final track The Mirror Gate represents something of an amalgam of the previous seven, closing the journey in a satisfyingly mesmerising, almost cinematic fashion.

Iter ad Psychen is a great example that modern dark ambient can remain relevant and capture a wide base of listeners without compromising on what made the genre great in the first place or straight out aping its forefathers. It's an engaging and thought-provoking, if unrevolutionary piece of audio that takes some of the best bits of the genre's development over the past 25 years and combines them into a coherent whole. Not every album needs to reinvent the wheel, and it's oftentimes a better experience to hear a new, personal take on existing bases than get lost in experimentation, an approach that Kloob delivers perfectly well here.

Rating: 8/10