Progressive Rock
Island Music Studio · 14 April 2026
“Shadows In The Dark” runs nine minutes and thirty-two seconds and shows how “No Rewind” is built: a riff-and-drums section moving straight ahead, a bridge of bright keyboards and Marcin Staszek’s voice in the middle, never strained and always ahead of the mix. The record does not hide where it comes from — the Polish neo-prog of the past twenty years, thick low end and wide-bodied keyboards — and it does not settle into it either: there is more energy than melancholy here, which is the opposite of what that school usually does.
Moonrise is Kamil Konieczniak’s project; he writes, produces and engineers it, and plays the keyboards, guitars, bass and drums. The voices are guests: Ania Batko — of Albion, Hipgnosis and tRKproject — on three tracks and Staszek on four, with Konieczniak recording the choral parts on two. Marcin Kruczek contributes the guitar solos on one of the compositions. The lyrics are by Łukasz Gałęziowski and deal with manipulation, memory and loss; the cover is by Eryk Konieczniak, and the album comes out on the author’s own imprint with distribution by Lynx Music.
The best of the record is its first stretch. “Two Roads” (5:24) opens with Batko and alternates blocks of guitar with almost ambient keyboard passages; “Single Game” (6:10) stretches the guitars upward and keeps the vocal restrained underneath; and “Cheaters” (5:02) is the only place where electronics come in, with a groove that gains weight until the riff lands on top of it.
The second half lowers the intensity on purpose. “Silent Rooms” is three minutes of solo piano working as a hinge, and the album closes with “All About You”, ten minutes and twenty seconds with Batko singing, layered keyboards and heavily reverbed solos, built by accumulation.
The hardest thing to accept is who sings. A record about memory and loss, with every lyric written by the same person, is sung by two different people who split the tracks with no visible narrative logic. Batko and Staszek both sing well and sound nothing alike, so every change of track is also a change of narrator. Being made by one man has a second consequence: the rhythm section always serves the song and never answers it, and the few times one line replies to another are when the guest guitar comes in.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Guillem Cardós