MetalProgressive Rock
Self-released · 9 October 2026
“The Prologue” runs a minute and a half and walks straight into “The Verdict”, and in those six minutes the record has already shown its whole hand: a real orchestra, riffs chopped the way djent chops them, a full choir, male and female rock vocals and a growl at the end. Nymue are from Enschede, “Born From Dark Waters” is their first album, and it came out on 9 October with no label behind it, across two discs and nineteen tracks adding up to an hour, twenty-five minutes and twelve seconds.
It was meant to be an EP. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Thirza Fekkes says the idea came out of Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples”, which retells Snow White from the stepmother’s side, and that they went looking for a story familiar enough to be turned around: they landed on the Arthurian legend, told from Morgana’s point of view. “It all got a bit out of hand, really. That wasn’t quite the plan,” she says. Every character gets a voice: Jan Willem Ketelaers is Merlin, Sascha van der Meer is Guinevere, Sjoerd-Klaas Steegstra is King Arthur, and the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone have one each. Fekkes is Morgana, and besides singing her she plays flute, clarinet, whistles and didgeridoo.
The orchestra isn’t there as carpet. “Whispers of Despair”, nine minutes, ends with high voice, strings and winds building the melody over heavy guitars and a galloping kit, and the two instrumental twins, “Fleeing From Camelot” and “Returning to Camelot”, allow themselves a film-score language with no guitar out front at all. “Lullaby of Demise” and “By The Old Stone Gate” drop into ballad territory on Fekkes’s flute and clarinet, which is where the conservatory training shows. Everything was recorded in the studios of the Enschede conservatory, where two of the guitarists were students, and the only job farmed out was the mastering. The guest musicians were paid: “As a flautist it’s happened to me plenty of times that you’re asked to play ‘for exposure’,” says Fekkes.
There’s one thing this record can’t do, and that’s stay quiet. The band fills every gap that opens with one more instrument, and with an orchestra, a choir and two guitars all working at once the result is a mass that, by the second hour, tires more than it impresses. The first casualty is Reinier van Zwieten’s bass, buried almost throughout and audible only in the few moments when everyone else steps aside. The closer, “String Pulled Crown”, five minutes forty, is a sung duel between Morgana and Merlin with Camelot burning behind them, and it works precisely because there are only two voices in it.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Roger Estivill