Progressive Rock
Heavy Psych Sounds · 25 September 2026
“Bright Shadow” (7:13) is the third track and the longest here, and the only moment where the Tuscan quartet gives itself room to breathe. The garden of the title is the image that recurs most, and the band spells it out: “We chose it as a metaphor for a refuge, a place where we can nurture our natural inclinations, let them grow and blossom, and where we can also keep our shadows and lights hidden”.
The line-up is arranged in an unusual way. Matteo Barsacchi and Davide Salvadori both play guitar and synth; Matteo Sciocchetto takes the bass and the only voice on the record, and Lorenzo Salvadori the drums. Which is to say the two guitarists are also the two keyboard players, and that decision is what makes the synth layers work as one more guitar rather than as a backdrop.
The production chain for a forty-minute record covers four cities. Barsacchi produced and recorded it, Richard Behrens – the man behind records by Elder and Kadavar – mixed it at Big Snuff Studio in Berlin, and Carl Saff mastered it in Chicago, except for “Bright Shadow”, which went to Ayan Mastering in Portland.
Heavy Psych Sounds presents this as the most epic and immersive record they have made, and the architecture says otherwise: past “Bright Shadow”, at minute sixteen, no track reaches five minutes, and five of those remaining fit inside a fifty-one-second band, between the 4:07 of “Astray” and the 4:58 of “Old Hue”. The album opens fully a third of the way in and then holds a single size for twenty-three minutes, which for a concept about hiding and revealing is a conservative choice.
Eight tracks and forty minutes. The previous one, Echoes From the Universe, came out in February 2024 on the same label, and before that were the concept album Seaward (2020) and Holy Oak (2018). The label places the record alongside Weedpecker, King Buffalo, Lowrider, Dead Meadow and Sergeant Thunderhoof; of those, King Buffalo have Doomsayer announced for 4 December.
Rating: 7.6/10
Text by Guillem Cardós