ALBUM REVIEW: The Waking Sun – El Moono

The release of EL MOONO’s debut album, The Waking Sun, is something to be marvelled at. Hectic and heavy but with an unmistakable aura of ethereality, the album is exhilarating, unnerving, and beautiful all at the same time.

Starting as the album means to go on, the atmospheric Dawn is packed full of synths and serves as the ideal opening for what’s to come. Bleeding beautifully into Illusionist, the band claim they wanted to “pull the rug out from underneath people’s feet”, and they’ve definitely mastered that here. As an album, The Waking Sun is intense, raw, and almost difficult to listen to in many instances. Covering important but hard-to-swallow topics such as mental health, trauma, and abuse, EL MOONO deserve high praise for doing this with honesty and depth.

There’s no doubt how difficult it is to speak openly about these personal, hard-hitting issues in such a vulnerable format, but the ability to delve so deep while maintaining a consistently good sound is even harder, and EL MOONO have perfected it. The title track is a deep exploration of depression, tackling the subject head-on and confronting the idea that depression lingers within throughout every waking moment of the day. Vocalist Zac Jackson’s voice is astounding, with the track also featuring backing vocals from Leah Stanhope of CONGRATULATIONS, adding a whole extra layer of emotion.

Tracks such as Haunting, The Charm and Marionettes are key players in demonstrating the album’s main signature characteristic: rolling dramatically from hard-hitting, heavy guitar riffs to beautiful, more exposed vocals within seconds. Each song feels like an almighty exploration of the hardships of the human experience, resulting in an unpredictable and unreliable sound that keeps you firmly on your toes. With every word sung with such pained emotion, Marionettes is one of the strongest and angriest tracks on the album. Written about being someone’s puppet, it features heavily layered, thrashing guitars and even utilises beer kegs as instruments throughout the riffs.

Two of the most hard-hitting tracks lyrically on The Waking Sun are The Charm and Chains. Both written about domestic abuse and abusive relationships, it can only be deemed an incredibly vulnerable and courageous thing to speak so openly about such harrowing topics. With this, it’s clear that EL MOONO aren’t afraid to confront their pain head-on, which is something that makes The Waking Sun so successful.

Leading on from this, another thing that sets EL MOONO apart from other bands in a similar bracket is their ability to shift from genre to genre seamlessly. While primarily being a modern metal, post-hardcore band, it’s clear in The Waking Sun that the band have the ability to draw and utilise influence from everything from shoegaze to grunge, as the album continually weaves in and out of genres. Despite this, every track on The Waking Sun fits together like the pieces of a puzzle. Bringing it all together, nothing could finalise it more perfectly than Soul Eclipse and Dusk. Combined, these tracks feel unstoppable, like the idyllic climax the rest of the album has been building up to. Soul Eclipse embraces the listener with a fearless mixture of heavy riffs, while Jackson’s vocals are haunting and raw, covering the topic of PTSD and the effects associated with it.

To sum it up, The Waking Sun is more than just another album. It’s an important exploration of difficult, hard-hitting topics that are so often ignored, and a real testament to the raw talent of EL MOONO as a band.

Rating: 8/10

The Waking Sun is out now via Lockjaw Records.

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