Twelve years ago, Nothing But The Whole stopped without warning. Its closer, "Lowland," was severed mid-riff, the record ceasing as though someone had pulled the tape, and its listeners argued over that non-ending for a decade. Nowhere Speaks opens by picking the severed riff back up. "Nothing But The Whole (Part 2)" resumes mid-phrase, as if no time had passed at all. Then the new album runs its course and, on closer "All For Nothing," slides into "Go and Hope," the first song of that 2014 record. The two albums lock into a circle with no seam and no starting point. You can enter EMPTINESS's seventh full-length anywhere, because it was built to have no outside.
The forty-odd minutes between those two anchors ask a lot of you. On a first pass, and especially on a distracted one, Nowhere Speaks comes across as a single muddy mass: a downtuned wall of guitar with the bass shoved low and heavy beneath it, almost no air anywhere. The vocals offer no way out either. Harsh, distorted and robotic, they sit behind the instruments instead of over them, one more texture in the murk. Put it on as background and it hands you noise.
Give it your attention, though, and the mass comes apart. The clarity is startling: riffs, bass, drums and keys all audible at once, each doing separate work. This is where the label's "avant-garde, black and death metal" description resolves into something you can point to. At its base the album is slow-to-mid-tempo death metal, heavy and deliberate. Black metal surfaces in flashes, mostly through reverbed, tremolo-picked guitar that widens the atmosphere. Post-metal governs how the density gathers and holds. And the avant-garde part, the one the label tag names without explaining, arrives as atmosphere and flat-out industrial texture, clearest on the title track "Nowhere Speaks." That the whole thing holds together this cleanly is partly a production matter: Jérémie Bézier and Olivier J.L.W. author the music between them, with Bézier handling production, mixing and mastering — the record has the single-minded coherence of a closed circuit run by two people.
What it really asks is that you switch everything else off. The album won't sit politely in the background; it reaches for your attention and keeps it until the other thoughts fall away and you're somewhere inside it. That's a demand, and EMPTINESS make no effort to soften it. The one place the pressure lets up is "Next In Line," slower and quieter than everything around it, a short exhale before the loop pulls shut again.
None of that comes free. The muddiness that scans as a flaw on first contact is the price of getting in, and the band charge it deliberately. Sit with it properly, with the room shut out, and the wall resolves into the thing it always was. The record then does what its own structure describes: it closes around you, and there's no obvious way back out.
Release: July 17 2026
Links:
Bandcamp · Season of Mist · Pre-order / Pre-save
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