Review: New Risen Throne - The Journey to Reach the Fathers

Artist: New Risen Throne

Album: The Journey to Reach the Fathers

Label: Cyclic Law

Release date: December 2025

Whatever your favourite flavour of this genre, there's no denying that New Risen Throne releasing a new album ought to be one of the most important dark ambient events of the year in anyone's calendar. This relatively reclusive Italian artist, part of the Cyclic Law pantheon from the mid-2000s, is definitely not the most prolific out there, releasing merely four bona-fide albums in a span of 17 years, the reasons for which he outlined in our recent interview. Joining forces with Cyclic Law once again and following his philosophy of quality over quantity, he decided to present us with a fifth album (perhaps better described as a double album, owing to its running time of more than 90 minutes) just as 2025 draws to a close. Having had the opportunity to see and hear snippets of the new concept during New Risen Throne's performance in Zagreb, Croatia this summer, I was even keener than usual to see what final form his vision would take, and all I can say is that I'm glad I didn't rush this year's AOTY list.

In terms of sound, the latest New Risen Throne release manages to actually deliver what every piece of PR material for any new album promises - everything that we love about the project, but better. The core of the atmosphere is still provided by the trademark expansive scope of the sound, with pseudo-wind instruments, simmering background drones, eery vocals, and various metallic clangs joining forces to give the listener a feeling of marching through vast post-industrial, even post-societal spaces. What separates this album from any previous entry in New Risen Throne's discography, however, is its sheer scale. The sound has never felt more grandiose, the landscapes more picturesque, nor the darkness more profound. This explains the vastly increased track lengths as well, most of which go past the ten-minute mark, as the storyline simply requires more time to be properly constructed and told. While the album's concept isn't explained in too much detail, one can infer that it's about an advanced, yet moribund civilisation discovering a way to look back into its past in order to find a way forward out of the death and decay surrounding them. The first three tracks, all of which involve a collaboration of some kind, serve as a kind of introduction to the core story that consists of the five Gate tracks; that being said, these introductory tracks are some of the most massive, most potent material New Risen Throne has ever produced, as he leverages the very best of individual contributors' strengths to enrich the vision on display here. The second track in particular, whose name may be familiar to some from the debut Whispers of Approaching Wastefulness, is a tour-de-force in its own right, with one of the best and most powerful build-ups heard on any dark ambient album in recent years. The aforementioned five Gate tracks see the project move back into more classic territory sound-wise, with fewer individual ingredients, but no less vivid a depiction of the border world between the physical and the metaphysical. As the protagonists of our story pass from one realm to the next, the music follows along, becoming less and less tangible, with melodies fading into the background and the sound relying more on the subtleties that New Risen Throne is famous for pulling off so well. As this tunnel slowly reaches its end and we emerge on the other side, Gate V slowly builds back up into a crescendo, leading to a surprisingly airy, tranquil and upbeat last track (for this artist's standards, anyway). Was it what the bold adventurers were hoping for? It's hard to say, but the ending certainly feels conclusive.

While I may be suffering from recency bias to a certain extent, having had access to this album for only a few weeks, I am pretty confident in saying that this is New Risen Throne's most exciting work so far, and possibly the magnum opus of his career. The expertise, attention to detail and sheer ambition with which it has been crafted promises virtually unlimited replay value, while the vibrance and atmosphere of the aural world conjured on The Journey to Reach the Fathers is matched by very few releases in the past decade. It's an album that almost single-handedly revitalises the genre which has been somewhat limping of late, and shows that there are still vast territories to discover in sonic storytelling.

Rating: 10/10