Metal
ViciSolum Productions · 11 September 2026
“The Ascent” runs five minutes thirty-six and nobody sings on it: there is George Tzavaras’ spoken word, a three-voice choir and a block of strings, and the quartet stays underneath doing the groundwork. Mother of Millions have had no keyboard player since June 2019, when Makis Tsamkosoglou died at thirty-three during a show on the “Artifacts” tour, and they never replaced him; what fills that space here are Dimitris Anastasiou’s and Nikos Milas’ violins and the voices of Antonia Mavronikola, Sofia Kamina and Emi Path.
The title is a single letter, T. The lyrics, all by Kostas Konstantinidis, work in excerpts and adaptations of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Odysseas Elytis and Yiannis Ritsos, and the record is written against war without any attempt to disguise it. “The Wound” (4:07) and “The War” (4:18) use the same method: a spacious entrance that keeps loading until the choir arrives at the end.
The second half turns towards melodic shapes with a Mediterranean root. “As One” lasts exactly one minute and bridges into “The One” (4:06), the heaviest thing on the record; “The Circle” (4:42) works on atmosphere and rhythm more than on riff; and “The Sun”, eight minutes twenty, is the long track, with strings, dark voiceovers underneath and a quiet finish. “Death” (3:06) functions as an ambient epilogue and never quite becomes a song.
Both of the album’s peaks — “The Ascent” and the end of “The Sun” — arrive through strings, choir and spoken word, which is to say from where Tsamkosoglou’s keyboards would have been: the gap has not been filled in, it has been left to sound. The band has gone heavier and more direct since they became a four-piece, and the cost is that for long stretches their own four instruments are the chassis while the guests carry the music. Eight of the ten titles begin with “The”, and six of those eight run between four and five minutes. On a record carrying this much, they are harder to tell apart than they ought to be.
ViciSolum Productions, 11 September 2026. Ten tracks, 44:33, produced, mixed and mastered by hector.d.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Roger Estivill