Review: The Grey Lake - The Grey Lake

Artist: The Grey Lake

Album: The Grey Lake

Label: Winter-Light

Release date: November 2025

In a year already packed with excellent collaborations, Winter-Light thought it worthwhile to add another one to the mix: a new, intercontinental project between Ben Powell from Llyn Y Cwn and Christopher Olson of Standard Grey fame under the simple, yet evocative moniker The Grey Lake. In the glut of dark ambient releases enabled by the ubiquitousness of broadband internet and digital streaming platforms, adding a new name to the scene is a risky endeavour, so I was curious to hear what The Grey Lake was hoping to contribute to an already saturated landscape.

To start off, the sound on this album isn’t easy to define or pigeonhole into one of the convenient subcategories of dark ambient, as each track conveys a particular mood or scene, sometimes achieved through dreamlike drones, sometimes through overt industrial elements, and sometimes through that understated, subtle flow typical of the early-2000s Scandinavian school. The thread that really connects the album, therefore, is the flowing, multi-layered approach to songwriting rather than any specific set of sounds. The sonic backbone of The Grey Lake is unmistakably modern, complex and, much like Abby Helasdottir’s excellent cover art, thickly layered in its symbolism. The name of the album (or indeed the project itself) is no coincidence, as there’s a strong aquatic element to the compositions, while also building a lot of the atmosphere on strong industrial incursions, adding the greyness to the mix. While the duo keeps the album’s theme broad and the track titles minimalistic, the concept that emerges is very clear nevertheless, giving various interpretations of humanity’s interaction with the awe-inducing mass of water that most of our planet’s surface consists of, whether it’s Stone Age creation myths and deities or the indomitable human spirit of exploration and the need for seafaring. Unlike so many releases in the past few years, The Grey Lake puts great emphasis on dynamics, knowing very well how to play on both quietness and loudness to achieve the desired effect, while keeping the flow organic and never startling or overwhelming the listener, as exemplified by the longest and in my opinion best track of the album, Kulullu, an epic, dreamlike voyage across space and time.

In sum, The Grey Lake manages to provide a highly compelling piece of music and justify its running time of well over an hour, proving yet again that an album doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel to sound fresh and offer good replay value. In the era of dwindling attention spans, it requires a certain dedication to fully unwrap and appreciate, but it is its own reward in that sense. Do not let it fly under your radar as we head into 2026.

Rating: 8/10