Band:	Siderean
Album:	Lost On Void's Horizon
Style:	Progressive death metal
Release date:	June 2021

01. Eolith
02. Traversing
03. Lost On Void's Horizon
04. Sidereal Evolution
05. Coalescing Into The Expanse
06. Abyssophora

I've been waiting for a while for Teleport to finally drop their debut album. But it could only come under another name.

You might remember me covering Teleport's last EP in our Clandestine Cut series. I mean, you surely must remember since you voted for it to get into the MSAs. All four of you. But I did mention that "it's disheartening to see how long an amazing band can go without releasing a full-length, as Slovenia's Teleport has been putting out demos since 2010, though it's quite clear that The Expansion brings their sound to complete refinement." Well, a few things have changed. Teleport is no more. Siderean is in. It's mostly the same lineup, except that vocalist/guitarist Jan Medved was replaced by vocalist Jan Bri?ar and guitarist David Kocmur. Oh, and me calling that EP the complete refinement of their sound? Scratch that!

Teleport started out as kind of a black/thrash band that slowly got more technical and progressive. It peaked on 2018's The Expansion, which saw them more as a progressive death metal band, but with clear technical thrash metal roots. Now with the vocalist change, the band strays even further away from thrash metal. There's still some remnants of it, but mostly in the same way that a lot of similar progressive/technical death metal stems from an early stage of death metal that was still closely linked to thrash metal. So it's only natural that some of the riffing does get bits of technical thrash, but that's more like a slight nuance than a consistent characteristic of their sound anymore. The howls have turned into snarly growls. There's no denying it anymore. Siderean is a death metal band.

There's already a pretty big lineage of progressive technical death metal, and names like Cryptic Shift, Morbus Chron and Blood Incantation sound like pretty good reference points, as Siderean's sound doesn't really move much out of the bounds of these three. Maybe some parts are a bit more dissonant and angular, maybe a bit more Artificial Brain-ish, but on a fundamental level, there is nothing surprising about Siderean's sound. It is just incredibly well-done for what it is. The musicianship both in terms of creativity and showmanship, the production that tinges on both psychedelic and cosmic, both have improved quite significantly from what I considered complete refinement. So I'm not making that mistake again. Now I don't think even this is a complete refinement of their sound. There's still room to blow me away, because they're so good that I let myself raise my expectations.

Will I miss Teleport? I do think the band name had potential on its own. And I'm also quite bummed that it doesn't seem like Medved started any other project just yet. Lost On Void's Horizon though? Top notch!