With 4 studio albums and European tours supporting Cult Of Luna and The Ocean, ABRAHAM from Lausanne, Switzerland have forged their reputation as one of the leading post metal bands in Europe. Their fifth studio album adds a third and final chapter to a series of concept albums of truly epic proportions, at the center of which lies a sprawling, apocalyptic portrayal of humanity’s downfall. Still staged in the gritty atmosphere and philosophical weight of post-metal, sludge, and ambient noise, ‘idsungwüssä’ sees Abraham march even further into dissonant and defiant territory. “The three albums are clearly linked together thematically” comments the band, “although, rather than an additional chapter, idsungwüssä is more like a parallel narrative to 'Débris de mondes perdus'. The latter was a jump in time after 'Look, Here Comes the Dark!, whereas 'idsungwüssä' is a jump in space, a journey away from earth. It should be the final piece of this little jolly ride.” This album isn’t just heavy, it is absolutely drenched in delicious filth, and yet by embracing even more the melodic interludes and melancholic passages, they create a devastating contrast to the wall of power coming from stacked guitars, catastrophic drums and raging, sharp vocals – delivered in Swiss-German dialect. “The album was recorded between November 2024 and February 2025, all while handling our day jobs and in a period that was, on a personal level, not the easiest for some of us. It is only in the last two weeks of the recording process, right before sending it out to mixing, that it sort of came together and started to feel like a coherent album, an album that we could be happy and proud about. For an album with change/transformation as an underlying theme, this is sort of performative!” This urgency and duress bleeds into every song, an hour long journey that moves from the grim to sublime, from melancholy to raw destruction — evoking ruined civilisations and the last wails of fractured psyches. Yet there is something less bleakly human, more ethereal at moments, as if glimpsing beyond the constraints of the body and its wheel of flesh and death. “…we got rid of a lot of things that we felt tied us up to the past. We were also able to finally give a proper place to one of our most beloved pieces of gear: a Farfisa Louvre organ that had been with us for the last fifteen years. And with this album, we wanted to use keyboards again. The Farfisa can be heard here or there on our previous records, but this time we wanted to use it for real parts rather than quirky cameos: for instance the intro of “Naked in a Naked Sky” has been played on this Farfisa Louvre and on a CRB Diamond 701. There is a lot of Farfisa on this record.” Abraham also collaborated with Kevin Galland (Coilguns) who recorded some Moog and piano parts. Lending to these haunting contrasts that leave the listener adrift in hypnotic ore in one moment, only to be smashed the next, plummeting into dissident heavy madness. “Our approach to recording guitars was different than what we did before. Instead of having one guitar on the left playing a part and one on the right playing another part, we decided that left and right guitars were to play the same part, and the center guitar was to play another part. We just stacked more guitars whenever we needed. And oh did we use a lot of reverb, too!” The structures and movements of the songs feel so unique and fresh, there is a balancing of themes and emotions that is both intoxicating and unsettling, it is an immersive journey that rewards deep listening and challenges the boundaries of genre. In the heavy fervour you feel as though the whole song could fly to pieces at any moment, as if you were balanced at the very threshold. “The main thing for us is to have something to hold on to; previously it had been texts, stories that we wrote before the music. This time around we had drawings by Dave (drums, vocals) as a starting point. It was really different and proved somewhat of a challenge. When it came to writing music, we tried to express what we felt these drawings should sound like — a synesthesia of sorts. We spent a lot of time together writing the first demos, then took them apart to keep only the parts that made the more sense to us, and we pieced them together to form the actual songs, and then we arranged them until we felt they were in their final form. The contrast between heavy and melodic elements definitely comes from this writing process.” From the patient grandeur of coming extinction, to the chaos and fevered urgency of the aftermath, in ‘idsungwüssä’ Abraham move forward from prophetic lamentation to an elegiac visceral response. The emotional closure of this expression is felt, something final that will leave you speechless and with only one real option; listen to it again. FOR FANS OF BREACH • CULT OF LUNA • WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM • NEUROSIS • WIEGEDOOD • GLASSING • CONJURER • LLNN • AMENRA • ULTHA
