ALBUM REVIEW: Voidkind – Dvne
If you had a nickel for every time DVNE released a record in the same year as a film adaptation of the book from which they take their name, you’d have two nickels – which isn’t a lot but it is wonderful that it’s happened twice. Like Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic masterworks – and indeed Frank Herbert’s classic novel decades before them – the Edinburgh-based progressive post-metallers deal in a staggering vastness, a sweeping, epic, interplanetary scale that has been captured on a few great records already at this point and is presented once again in all its widescreen glory on their third full-length album Voidkind.
Following the high watermark of their 2021 Metal Blade debut Etemen Ænka, Voidkind sees the band aiming perhaps unconventionally for more immediacy this time around. A reaction to their live experiences on the Etemen cycle, the intention is for the tracks to get to the point a little quicker here, as is immediately apparent when opener Summa Blasphemia comes thundering to life with full and cataclysmic force within a matter of seconds. It’s either a baptism of fire for the uninitiated or a welcome return to the DVNE-iverse for those familiar with it – all winding sludgy riffs and rapturous bellows and atmospheric textures and soaring melodic vocals laying out what the band have now firmly established as something of a trademark sound.
Indeed, even though there is still nearly a full hour of music on Voidkind, there is an urgency to this record that arguably elevates it not only above any of DVNE’s previous work, but also that of many others one might identify as operating in a similar sphere. It’s not just that many of the tracks lurch into life as quickly as the opener, there are other factors at play here too: a breathless and desperate emotion to a track like Reliquary, for example, or even a catchiness to the likes of Reaching For Telos or the album’s fantastically chosen lead single Plērōma. Where music of this nature can so often feel overly self-indulgent or complex for the sake of complexity, DVNE imbue theirs with genuine feeling and meaning and unmistakable humanity.
To be clear though, Voidkind is by no means lacking in any of the expanse or density one may have come to expect from the band. As if to prove this after the relative brevity of the aforementioned Summa Blasphemia (which still clocks in at around five-and-a-half minutes to be fair), second track Eleonora pushes well towards the nine-minute mark – this exactly the kind of epic, dynamic and ultimately towering composition the band do so well, and far from the only one like it. Recent single Abode Of The Perfect Soul is another of the album’s finest, as hypnotic in its hulking groove as it is in its more ethereal and melodic sections, while closer Cobalt Sun Necropolis works its way through the best part of ten minutes to a climactic finale that eventually slips beneath overwhelming static to leave only a stunned silence in its wake.
You’ll have to forgive the cliché but it really does feel like the record goes on a proper journey to get to that climax. As with all of DVNE’s work there is a detailed concept behind it which this time tells the story of “a godlike entity seducing & luring followers through their dreams and these followers’ multigenerational journey to reach their god dimension”, but you don’t need to follow that to get a sense of something massive at play. It is masterfully sequenced and structured too, its longer songs balanced out by the comparatively more accessible and immediate ones, and a couple of well-placed interludes in the form of Path Of Dust and Path Of Ether that serve not only as welcome moments of respite but also to make the album’s most imposing peaks stand that much taller.
If it feels like this review has overdone it a bit in the search for synonyms for words like gigantic and expansive that is only because all are needed to even begin to do Voidkind justice. As if there was any doubt at this point, DVNE are truly masters of their craft, one of a rare and special breed whose music treads the near impossibly fine line between the progressive and the primal, the intricate and the intuitive, so to speak. They’re one of the UK’s very finest and here they have produced one of the best metal albums – prog, post, or otherwise – you will hear this year.
Rating: 9/10
Voidkind is set for release on April 19th via Metal Blade Records.
Like DVNE on Facebook.