Post-rock
Self-released · 10 September 2026
The six tracks are called “death”, “is”, “just”, “another”, “path I” and “path II”, and read in sequence they spell “Death is just another path”. The line is Gandalf’s, spoken to Pippin in “The Return of the King”, and the album title comes from the same speech: “White shores… and beyond. A far green country”. The cover matches — a small boat rowing towards a gap of light between two dark mountains — and the record does indeed begin at the end: “death” is eight and a half minutes that start bright, with the guitars singing.
hubris. are from Fribourg, in Switzerland, and formed in 2014 playing metalcore. Twelve years on they are an instrumental quartet (Matthieu Grillet and Jonathan Hohl on guitars, Lucien LeClerc on bass, Léo Juston on drums) and this is the fifth album, after “Emersion” (2015), “Apocryphal Gravity” (2017), “Metempsychosis” (2020) and “The One Above” (2023). They release it themselves on 10 September. “just” is the piece that makes the case for them: nine and a half minutes in which the clean guitar keeps hypnotising until the riffs take over, with a full climax that does not hide behind the usual wall of sound.
The trouble with an instrumental record that entrusts a whole sentence to its sequence is that it has no way of saying it other than through dynamics, and the dynamics here are the ones post-rock has been using for twenty years: calm, build-up, release. “path I” opens with a rhythm that promises another route and before long settles back into the groove. It does sound heavenly, and that is the problem: across fifty minutes there is not one moment that puts the listener in any difficulty. The list of reference points the band offers — Jakob, This Will Destroy You, Tides of Man, Jon Hopkins — explains the production, which is splendid, and also explains why there is no turn here you have not heard before.
“path II” closes, and it is the track that comes nearest the metal they came from: big, epic and not much given to restraint. On vinyl the two “path” parts are joined into a single piece; on digital they are separate, which is how the band released it.
Rating: 7.3/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre