The Puppeteer was a remarkable debut release from Monosphere, one that dabbled with post-metal and progressive metal ideas within a djent-core framework. The German band has been even more ambitious on its sophomore effort, expanding out a number of songs and playing with new elements, including ear-catching electronica, jazzy clean guitar, trumpets, and piano flourishes. All these new ideas slot in seamlessly alongside the elements carried over the from the debut, including a proclivity towards blast beats, fierce djent riffs, harsh roars, and occasional yet effective melodic emotional peaks, all of which come together to underline Monosphere as one of the more exciting voices in the progressive metalcore sphere.

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Such a poetic title adorns an album with no lyrics whatsoever – it almost makes you wish that Night Verses had gone back to pick up another vocalist, but these beautiful soundscapes need no narration. 2018’s From The Gallery Of Sleep made an unexpected and wildly successful debut for Night Verses as an instrumental band and they’ve not only stuck with that idea, they’ve begun to really run with it. While they still haven’t fully abandoned the metalcore mentality that they started their career with, those breakdowns, technical bursts, and melodic choruses have adapted into showcases of instrumental prowess informed by similar instrumental ventures established in the djentsphere, and a great deal of range is now possible between soft reverberations of post-metal and hard-slamming thall climaxes. Already it’s strange to think about how much of an experiment From The Gallery Of Sleep was – now that we’re through Every Sound Part 1, Part 2 can’t come swiftly enough.

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Some of you may remember Poltergeist from their Blotted Science-style soundtracking of Big Monkey vs. Big Lizard, which was a fun introduction to the type of production and carnage that eponymous mastermind Poltergeist has on offer. The project's debut album isn't quite as fun - look at that screaming, Giger-esque form being assimilated on the cover - but there is still a haunting sense of something very powerful and very vile getting perilously close to splattering you across an alleyway, and the organic movement through themes and moods is just that slick and demented. Every high-gain punch of synchronized guitar and percussion sounds like two suspension bridges colliding with each other; this is the djent you'd play for somebody who felt that Car Bomb wasn't enough like being hammered in the face.

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Pupil Slicer's debut, Mirrors, was quite unquestionably a mathcore album. The follow-up, Blossom, does some things to take a step out of that The Dillinger Escape Plan mold. There're a lot more injections of Deftones-ish alt metal, Deafheaven-ish blackgaze, post-rock, and electronica as well as taking the core sound, already intricate due to its mathcore origins, in some directions that seem more in line with progressive metalcore than the controlled chaos of the mathcore sound. It's also grander in scope and sound and in the way it integrates all these new reference points into their style on this ambitious record.

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With Laure Le Prunenec (Corpo-Mente, Öxxö Xööx, ex-Igorrr) behind the microphone, you can't go wrong. This is probably what Stömb thought, and so the four French musicians, known for their purely instrumental performances, open their third full-length album with a seven-minute paean to the exceptional skills of the vocal virtuoso Le Prunenec aka Rïcïnn. During the remaining nine songs, Stömb delve deep into the heavy tones and intricate rhythms of djent, incorporating extensive electronic elements reminiscent of The Algorithm to keep the hour-plus running time engaging. While the album offers a dynamic range that combines metallic rhythms with trip-hop beats and industrial elements, it also showcases Stömb's versatility with softer tracks like "In Absence Of Sun" and a post-rock-inspired closer. Overall, Massive Disturbed Meta Art is a very well-crafted, commendable exploration of instrumental djent with an impressive opener that will appeal to progressive music enthusiasts and fans of excellent music in general alike.

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Djent heavyweights TesseracT have pulled out all the stops in following up 2018’s bitesize Sonder; new album War Of Being comes with an accompanying video game, with a novel also in the works. It’s a grand treatment, but it’s one that the music justifies; War Of Being may be the greatest TesseracT release yet. Daniel Tompkins continues to impress as a supremely talented and diverse vocalist, and is given his most compelling material yet to deliver on this new release, while the typically pristine production fully captures both the punchy attack and lush soundscaping of TesseracT across this landmark release.

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Wherever in the world that is, it sounds like a great place to be. Zon, for its part, is a great way to sound: not particularly quiet, it must be admitted, and rather unwilling to let a moment slip by unincorporated into a song-length groove. There’s a lot more BTBAM-BAM than there is Planet Earth serenity. The band explores the fringes of the djent/prog/metalcore convergence with more of an emphasis on the actual prog side of things than is common, and vocalist Lou Kelly utilizes a wide palette of vocal techniques to keep up with the constantly shifting mood of the instrumentalists, always over-the-top and expressive no matter what. Zon is an ambitious record, one that will likely make The World Is Quiet Here a household name in mathy circles for a long while.

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