Band:	Ash Twin Project
Album:	Tales Of A Dying Sun
Style:	Post-metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	April 04, 2025
A review by:	musclassia

01. Cœlacanthe
02. The Wilds
03. Isolation
04. Sunless City
05. Moon

Having largely lost interest in the medium for a few years, I’ve gotten back into video gaming in the past few years, and in last year I played a game called Outer Wilds that sparked something of an obsession in me for a few months after: strong enough, in fact, to have my eye instinctively drawn towards a new release earlier this month that was clearly inspired by the game.

If the name Outer Wilds has popped up on your radar previously and piqued your interest, I can fully recommend a) playing the game, and b) going into it with as little prior knowledge as possible, since so much of the experience is dependent upon exploration and discovery. As such, I might suggest to not focus too much on the lyrics of Tales Of A Dying Sun, the debut record of French prog/post-metal band Ash Twin Project, as they are as entirely inspired by the contents of said game as the band name. However, when a band wrote a concept album about one of my favourite pieces of recent media in one of my favourite niches of metal, I felt a compulsion to give a bit of attention to the album, particularly since it’s actually pretty decent.

When describing it as prog/post-metal above, I would say that progressive metal is easily the primary genre of Tales Of A Dying Sun; while it is has plenty of dynamic range (including a good mix of clean-sung and screamed vocals), it’s not out of the ordinary of regular prog, and the instrumentation on a song such as “Isolation” has much more to do (tonally and rhythmically) with a band like (Coal/The Congregation-era) Leprous – or latter-day The Contortionist when the synths come in near the song end – than any post-metal band that comes immediately to mind. However, there are notable post-rock and post-metal influences on the record, from sweet tremolo layers in “Cœlacanthe” to the more patient and brooding structure of “Sunless City”.

Still, the album’s progginess is a defining feature of its composition, primarily for the complexity of the rhythm and structure of its riffs. The album opens with syncopation in “Cœlacanthe”, and has plenty of choppy, polyrhythmic/syncopated guitar and rhythmic work in the chorus of “The Wilds”, the bouncing bridge of “Sunless City”, and numerous other occasions. The guitar tone, partly due to the production, is a tad muted, but there are some chunkier moments (particularly on “Sunless City”) that bring the heaviness. There’s also a good amount of more emotionally oriented clean guitar work, especially in the verses of “The Wilds”.

The members of Ash Twin Project have experience in some other previous bands, including Silent Opera and Prophetic Scourge, but this is a debut record, and exhibits several hallmarks of being such that hold it back. The production is a bit of a hurdle, muffling the album somewhat and diminishing its impact. Also flawed in its execution is the phrasing of the clean vocals; Eglantine Dugrand has a nice voice, and when more relaxed (as in “The Wilds”) it can convey some pleasant melodies, but the band do tend to overload the lyrics somewhat, and it turns tracks such as “Cœlacanthe” into a stream of words more than a satisfying set of vocal lines. Additionally, the melodies themselves are not always the strongest, particularly the slightly awkward chorus of “Sunless City”.

Still, I do find there to be charm and promise to Tales Of A Dying Sun. The game Outer Wilds has a very memorable soundtrack, but aside from a couple of nods (particularly in the final seconds of closing track “Moon”), Ash Twin Project have managed to stick to original composition, and there are fun riffs (particularly the Leprousisms in “Isolation” and “Moon”), satisfying melodies and interesting song structures, even when factoring in the album’s rough edges. I do like Tales Of A Dying Sun slightly more for the idea than the execution, but there’s more than enough that I enjoy here that I would be keen for a follow-up record that hopefully makes the necessary improvements to become something really gripping.