Meierkord/Andersson - Passager (2025)

Two Scandinavian artists Henrik Meierkord and Pelle Andersson joined forces to create a gem of an album. This neoclassical release is as beautiful as it is dark and unnerving.

"A thoughtful soundscape filled with blackness and sadness but also streaks of light" is what the album is called on the artists' Bandcamp and there is no way to deny that. The piano keys come and go, making the world a bit more beautiful with each stroke. But they are only a counterbalance here. The slowness of the compositions and the gravity of strings in the backgrounds make the instrumental soundscapes ridiculously unnerving in the most attractive of ways.

And there is a good reason for the concept for the album as Andersson had to face the cruelty of serious sickness and all the emotions it brings with itself. Once again, the quote from the artists describes it in the best way possible, calling the album "passages between hope and warmth, despair and panic. Where light meets darkness, the beautiful the distorted".

Passager costs 7 EUR (72 SEK).

Check: Försjunken

Country: Sweden

Genre: dark neoclassical

Label: Ella Ruth instituten

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Nac/Hut Report - Blue Afternoon (2025)

There is few Polish music projects that can be identified after the first second of their tracks. Nac/Hut Report is certainly one of them: the uniqueness of their ambient pop is genuinely impressive and it's not only uniqueness for its own sake. The duo creates music that feels a bit like a journey to some extraterrestrial lands and a bit like something extremely close to the heart.

Normally ambient pop makes me think of drone backgrounds and barely audible vocals put over them. Basically Midwife. But the Kraków-based project refreshes the concept, developing the backgrounds into full-fledged experimental sounds with some industrial flavour to them, thoroughly pressed down by the gramophone-like noise that makes the colourful mosaic of very different sounds feel like a coherent canvas that can be painted over with the vocals. And those also are a little bit different: they are quite well audible but definitely not easy to decipher either so that the mystery that embraces Nac/Hut Report's music deepens and deepens with every song and every album they produce.

I particularly like when those layers of sounds, not very loud on their own, are placed on each other, creating a sound that is not far from overwhelming while still being the slowcorest of slowcores. The duo definitely makes for one of the most least-known-but-deserving-much-more artists based in this country.

Blue Afternoon costs 2.5 EUR (10 PLN).

Check: Comet

Country: Poland

Genre: experimental ambient pop

Label: enjoy life

Nac/Hut Report - Absent (2023)

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Snakeskin - We Live in Sand (2025)

It's been already some years since I posted about Julia Sabra, my favourite Lebanese artist who makes her name as a vocalist in Postcards but also as half of a music duo with Fadi Tabbal. The title of the album they debuted as a duo became the name of the project, but the music stays the same: more experimental than Postcards, but still fairytale-ishly ethereal.

The music here is different from your ordinary dream pop charmers' sounds. The glitchy, the uncomfortably noisy and a bit industrial meets the airy and wavy in the best way possible. It makes the skin crawl a little, but, before it gets too much to bear, it gets ironed over with some beautiful guitar sounds. Or flute. Or cute electronica. But at the same time, it's also very much minimalist: there doesn't have to be much to create the atmosphere and the duo proves it over and over again. The vocalizations in Olive Groves is joined by pipe organ-like sounds and not much more and that's just an example.

But everything here is glued together by Sabra's ethereal vocals. This is deceptive, however, as the beauty of the vocals is counterbalanced by the gravity of the lyrics, commenting on the situation in Lebanon loomed over by the never-ending Near East war. "It’s a stunning paradox — a song about birth, caught in the middle of destruction. Hope, fragile and flickering, seeps through the rubble. Snakeskin has always thrived in extremes, but here the contrast is sharpened to a knife’s edge". It's true, but it's also true that the third album from the duo is their darkest yet but seeing how the situation in the region develops, it may not be the darkest in general.

We Live in Sand costs 10 USD.

Check: Olive Groves

Country: Lebanon

Genre: experimental dream pop

Label: Ruptured / Beacon Sound

Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal - Snakeskin (2022)

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Amber Ambedo - Invierno Ambedo (2025)

Orchestral post-rock will always have the face of GY!BE, but there is a number of smaller bands who want to go in a similar direction of the grand and diversified sounds of post-rock music that could as well be created by a real-life orchestra. One of them, Portland-based Amber Ambedo, has recently released their debut album and it's a debut to remember.

Thank you to my dunk!festival mates who gave me a hint about this band because the merciless algorithms didn't notify me of its existence and I wouldn't know otherwise. The Portlanders make "instrumental music that hits you right in the feels—and then lingers like a dream you can’t quite shake" - a true cinematic post-rock that tells stories without using any words. The compositions are complex, but easy to follow, the pace is not too fast but also far from slow and the instruments include piano and strings which means that I'm immediately sold. What I miss are some passages of real noise cause right now the songs sound like they end before something vital happened, but perhaps not everything has to be the noisiest in history.

On the other hand, I feel like this structural approach to music makes it indeed extremely cinematic. I can see the band performing to one of those silent movies on an event in an old cinema. But, I have to admit, the album sounds terrific also in a lightless room with speakers spitting out the notes into the darkness.

Invierno Ambedo costs 7 USD.

Check: Gathering Light in the Dark

Country: Oregon, US

Genre: orchestral post-rock

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