Progressive Rock
InsideOut Music · 25 September 2026
Two pieces carry Terrifying Angels: the title track (12:26) and “Hold Your Wrath” (14:45), which together account for 27:11 of the album’s 50:01. The first works with Floydian patience, the guitar entering over the top in isolated strikes while the keyboards hold the plane; the second keeps changing ground until it has passed through psychedelia, a jazz-leaning stretch and a gesture that sounds like a western score.
“Spin Like Fire” (3:31) opens with the house signature since The Dark Third (2006): two voices locked in harmony, now Jon Courtney’s and Annicke Shireen’s, with the distortion coming in underneath until it takes them apart. Three and a half minutes hold both sides of this band: the two voices locked together and the distortion that eats them from underneath.
“Black-Arrow Acrobats” (8:38) is the track that manages its material best: the drumming stays fine-grained and never raises its voice, and the quiet-to-loud turn takes so long to arrive that by the time it does it surprises nobody; it arrives all the same. “Below Radiance” (3:34) goes the other way, almost entirely electronic and with the vocal at half light, and it’s the one place where the band allow themselves not to do anything spectacular.
The line-up is Courtney (vocals, guitar, bass, keys and percussion), Shireen (vocals, credited as a guest), Greg Jong on guitars and Ravi Kesavaram on drums, with Mariusz Duda (Riverside, Lunatic Soul) and Kristoffer Gildenlöw (ex-Pain of Salvation) guesting on bass. Bruce Soord of The Pineapple Thief mixed it and John Webber mastered it at AIR Studios in London, and that mix is why the doubled vocals never get buried under the guitars.
With the two long pieces taking more than half the record, the remaining five tracks have to work as connective tissue, and two don’t get there: “Haywire Heart” (2:42) and “Rumination Ruin” (4:25) present an idea and leave before earning it. The album plays as two works and five approaches to them, which was already happening on Coming Up To Consciousness (InsideOut, 2024) with its interludes; here the seam shows less, but it still shows.
Seven tracks, fifty minutes, InsideOut Music, 25 September.
Rating: 7.6/10
Text by Guillem Cardós