MetalProgressive Rock
Willowtip · 16 October 2026
“Parturition” runs a minute and forty seconds and contains not one word: Fabienne Erni sings wordlessly over a still backdrop, and what arrives next is a drum roll and a wall of guitars. “The Mother Void” is seven tracks and sixty-nine minutes, four of them past eleven minutes: the title piece (12:54), “Aniara” (17:12), “Red Giant” (11:58) and “TON” (18:43). Iapetus are Matthew Cerami, who handles harsh vocals, guitars, bass and arrangements, and Jordan Navarro, on guitars, keys and drum arrangements. It is their first album since “The Body Cosmic”, of 9 November 2019, and it closes the trilogy on mortal existence and immortal space they opened with “The Long Road Home” on 14 March 2017.
Every clean vocal on the record is Erni’s, of Eluveitie and Illumishade, and what the album does best is the way it moves in and out of her. On the title track, Cerami’s scream and Erni’s mezzo-soprano hand the piece back and forth without an audible seam, and halfway through a short spoken passage lets the rhythm section breathe. The drums are played by Brody Taylor Smith, of Invent Animate, and were recorded by John Douglass at Vorticist Studios; Navarro and Smith share the drum arrangements. On “Aniara”, the second-longest track here, the clean vocals are Ethan Navarro’s.
“Red Giant” was the first single and is the track that shifts most: the opening minute tells you nothing about the rest, and the piece turns three or four times across its almost twelve. Between the long ones sits “Énouement”, a minute and fifty-one seconds of solo piano that lands exactly when the album starts to weigh.
“TON” is the most complex piece on the record and also the one that sounds most like somebody else. The gear changes, the guitar phrasing and the spoken lines about the death of the universe around the midpoint lead straight to Ne Obliviscaris, and Iapetus hand the solo to Benjamin Baret, that band’s guitarist. The quotation confirms itself: the track where the duo take the biggest risk is the one that asks least to be heard as theirs. Frank Harper, of Caelestra, guests on vocals.
The closer, “The World Be Undone”, is four minutes fifty-four of Erni’s voice with a male voice above a soft guitar, and the credits do not say whose: Ethan Navarro is listed as a guest vocalist with no tracks specified. Jens Bogren mixed the album and Tony Lindgren mastered it, with Alexander Backlund recording for Fascination Street Studios; the cover art is by Vanessa Lemen and the layout by Alex Eckman-Lawn.
Rating: 8.4/10
Text by Roger Estivill