KAL-EL don’t just push the fuzz on Astral Voyager Vol. 2—they ignite it, and it spreads like a slow cosmic weather front across an endless black sky. The sound doesn’t sit in front of you. It surrounds you. It seeps into everything, warm and glowing, like distant starlight bending through thick space dust, carrying echoes of an unexplored universe that never really faded—it just kept drifting outward.
“Juno” doesn’t start so much as it emerges, like a machine waking up inside a dark planet. The groove rolls forward like something massive turning in deep space, slow and inevitable. Each note feels dense, almost physical, like it has weight in your chest. Above it, Ståle Rodvelt’s voice cuts through the haze—clear, floating, almost detached from gravity itself, like a signal sent from a ship lost between systems. Nothing rushes. Everything pulls you in.
“The Nine” stretches time until it becomes unstable. Ten minutes feels less like duration and more like drift—like being carried through layers of atmosphere that don’t belong to any known world. The guitars don’t just play; they smear across the void in glowing arcs. The rhythm section doesn’t follow time—it bends it, like orbit adjusting itself around invisible mass. Somewhere in that movement, you lose the sense of where you are supposed to be.
“The Prophecy” arrives like a slow change in gravity. Everything feels slightly tilted, slightly unreal. The groove sways like a vast metal structure swaying in unseen wind, patient but alive. Then the breakdown hits—not as a moment, but as a collapse of light. It’s as if something enormous shifts just beyond the edge of perception, sending waves through everything you thought was stable.
“Juggernaut” doesn’t walk in—it presses down. The low end feels like continents of sound grinding against each other, slow and unstoppable. The bass doesn’t support the track; it becomes the ground, the air, the pressure in your ears. And yet, through all that weight, melodies rise like structures breaking through storm clouds—huge, radiant, almost painfully beautiful in contrast to the mass below.
“Pan” brings motion back into the void, like debris caught in a solar wind. It moves fast enough to feel alive, but never escapes the gravitational pull of the record. Everything is still being dragged through that same vast field of tone, just at a slightly sharper angle now, like something trying to remember momentum.
And then “Asteroid” loosens everything completely. The structure dissolves. What’s left is space—huge, unmeasured, breathing space. The riffs don’t develop anymore; they echo, like fragments of transmissions bouncing between dead stars. The melodies hover just above perception, weightless and distant, as if they’ve already left the system and are only now arriving as memory.
Astral Voyager Vol. 2 doesn’t behave like a collection of songs. It behaves like a single expanding field—one continuous movement through density, light, and distortion. No edges. No interruptions. Just flow, pulling everything along with it.
Released on Majestic Mountain, it carries the feeling of something both ancient and newly formed, like a fossil of future music being uncovered in real time. Even the knowledge that Tony Iommi once acknowledged them feels less like a reference and more like a signal echoing across generations of heavy sound.
This isn’t an album you listen to. It’s a space you enter. A slow drift through molten tone, where everything solid eventually turns fluid, and even silence feels like it’s moving. So let go of direction, and let it carry you wherever it has already decided you’re going.
-Helge Neumann
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