Progressive Rock
Lynx Music · 14 September 2026
“Pharmakon” is a Greek word that means remedy and poison at once, and the Kramarskis apply it to technology. The cover says so without text: two white automatons, standing with their backs to us, looking at a landfill that runs to the horizon with a digger in the distance and chimneys smoking. The title track runs seven minutes and sixteen seconds and is built the way Millenium’s are: it piles up until everything falls silent for an instant and then the guitar solo comes in.
FatherSon are father and son. Ryszard Kramarski plays keyboards and acoustic and electric guitars, writes all the music and owns Lynx Music, the Polish label that releases the record; his son Michał sings, with a voice that carries a touch of swagger. The rest is played by Marcin Kruczek on guitar, Krzysztof Wyrwa on bass and Grzegorz Bauer on drums, and that last one is the real change from the 2025 debut: there the drums were a drum machine. The lyrics are by Zdzisław “The Bat” Zabierzewski. It was recorded at the Lynx Music studios and at Lokum, and mixed and mastered by Kamil Koniecznak at Island Studio.
The record splits one song in two (“We Didn’t Part I” and “We Didn’t Part II”) and wedges “Hachiko” and “The Magical 80’s” in between, which have nothing to do with either. It is the only narrative gesture among the nine pieces and it is defused: by the time the second part arrives, the thread of the first went missing eleven minutes earlier. On a record this well stocked with choruses, it was the one thing that asked to run uninterrupted.
The rest does exactly what it sets out to do. The eighties are close at hand (one track is called “The Magical 80’s”) and Ryszard Kramarski’s keyboards cover everything, with a solo halfway through “Dreams Are a Waste of Time” that is among the moments you remember. It came out as a CD digipak on 14 September, catalogue number LM275CDDG, and runs a little over fifty minutes. “The World Without Hate” closes it, at seven minutes flat.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Guillem Cardós