Band:	Symbiotic Growth
Album:	Beyond The Sleepless Aether
Style:	Progressive black metal, Technical death metal
Release date:	March 28, 2025
A review by:	musclassia

01. Of Painted Skies And Dancing Lights
02. Spires Of The Boundless Sunset
03. The Architect Of Annihilation
04. The Sleepless Void
05. Arid Trials And Barren Sands
06. Lost In Fractured Reveries
07. Trading Thoughts For Sleep

Beyond The Sleepless Aether narrates a man’s journey through various alternate realities in a quest for the meaning of life, travelling from landlocked deserts to floating within the cosmos. Presumably somewhere out there is an alternate reality in which extreme prog isn’t the source of most of the year’s best metal, but based on the brilliant contents of this album, none of these songs were written in that reality.

The Canadian three-piece Symbiotic Growth formed in 2017, and followed it up with a decent self-titled record in 2020. Having gone back to it in the process of reviewing its successor, it’s made for perfectly reasonable listening, but the trio have evidently taken significant steps forwards on multiple fronts with Beyond The Sleepless Aether. It’s one of several albums that I’ve had lurking in my ‘to be reviewed’ queue for a few weeks while I’ve sought the time to tackle it; some of those albums were intriguing but flawed discoveries that were interesting enough to warrant further attention (see here and here), but a couple of them were special albums that deserved to have a spotlight shone on them, and Symbiotic Growth’s sophomore record falls firmly into the latter category.

The sound of the album falls somewhere between prog-black and prog-death, the former primarily due to the frequent use of black-tinged tremolos in the album’s riffing, while hints of tech-death also work their way into parts of the album (particularly the basswork). Tómarúm strike a somewhat comparable stylistic balance, but while their latest album left me slightly ambivalent due to its lack of memorability and truly gripping songs, Beyond The Sleepless Aether has no such problems. From the off, the album integrates complexity without sacrificing memorability, and it has a really strong ear for melody in a variety of forms, all the while blasting away and unleashing hellish vocals.

The album’s opening song, “Of Painted Skies And Dancing Lights”, is the shortest here at a meagre 7 minutes, and for large stretches it works off a single idea. From a slow yet grand opening, simple sustained chords and guitar melodies gradually transform into blackened tremolo riffs (with the drumming acting as a key instigator, first bringing in double bass and then blasts), all the while oscillating keyboard/synths work their way into the equation. However, all the shifts in these opening minutes are almost imperceptible at times, the band doing such a great job of making each tiny shift entirely seamless. It’s not until two-thirds of the way in that there’s a sudden stop for a new riff, but from then on that single-mindedness is out of the window, Symbiotic Growth chucking out tech-death riffs, melodic solos and a bunch of different ideas that collide one after another in rapid fire.

A few of the key elements of that first song persist into “Spires Of The Boundless Sunset”, including the persistence with the first initial riff for quite a while, as well as the sudden stop midway into the track; as good as many of the transitions are within songs during the record, there are minor issues with an over-reliance on sudden changes (“Lost In Fractured Reveries” is a more egregious example). However, the pay-off of the sections that follow more than make up for it; the mention above of synths returns in a big way here, as first ambient electronica, then pulsing synths, then bright synth melodies on top all come into the mix alongside emphatic percussion, segueing really effectively into blackened tremolos and finally a subdued denouement to the track of keyboard and double bass rolls. There’s something about the electronics here that reminds me a bit of Vadak by Thy Catafalque as much as anyone else, and the execution is impressively similar in quality.

“Spires Of The Boundless Sunset” also has the first appearance of clean vocals, which, while not being stellar in their execution, are effective in their brief uses. Arguably the album’s highlight, “The Architect Of Annihilation”, has the clean singing trading with growls atop tremolos and blasts in the opening seconds in a manner reminiscent of Ne Obliviscaris, and the darkly melodic feel of the relentless opening minutes of this song (from tremolo riffs, to fantastic meandering technical guitar lead riffs duetting with synths in a manner reminiscent of An Abstract Illusion) is a real conveyer belt of awesome excitement. With a mid-song pause and rebuild, the subsequent gradual escalation again harks to some of the most potent passages recorded by Ne Obliviscaris, bringing wondrous and sorrowful emotion into intense technical extremity.

Probably the other pick of the bunch is “The Sleepless Void”, but for different reasons. The distant, reverberating arpeggiated chord that opens the song is sustained for several minutes, with a really neat tremolo melodic guitar line working its way in alongside the chord, and then sustaining itself across the subsequent Abigail Williams-meets-An Abstract Illusion powerhouse of progressive black metal, one that arguably takes on a bit of a post-metal feel in its second half, layering up brooding mid-tempo chugs before escalating into a glorious eruption of tremolo and blasts.

At over an hour in length, the record is considerably longer than the band’s debut, and it’s not a flawless progression; for me, the weakest song here is “Arid Trials And Barren Sounds”, which has plenty of aggression, technicality and fury, but just lacks the memorability of what came before. The double pause in “Lost In Fractured Reveries” is also a bit much, but from when the chugs re-enter, it goes on a great journey of first all-out assault, and then a remarkable subdued section with a classic melodic prog solo to go with. The brooding closing track “Trading Thoughts For Sleep” also has a great extended bluesy solo in its middle between its patient, gradually evolving first half and rampant blasting finale. What few lapses the album has are outweighed by the sheer strength of much of its content; this record is a delight to listen to, and an early contender in what is traditionally one of the most competitive metal niches out there.