Moloken - Moloken (In stock and shipping!)

180g vinyl in marbled Galaxy Edition. In stock and shipping now! 



Moloken is not a band you explain. It is a band you walk into.

From Umeå, in the far north of Sweden, the quartet has spent nearly two decades making music that refuses a single genre. Doom, death, black, sludge, and post-metal all pull at them; none of them hold. The name itself is Swedish for “downhearted.” Since forming in 2007, Kristoffer Bäckström (guitar, vocals), Patrik Ylmefors (guitar), Nicklas Bäckström (bass, vocals), and Jakob Burstedt (drums) have treated every record as a shift in shape rather than a brand. Our Astral Circle (2009), Rural (2011), All Is Left To See (2015), and Unveilance of Dark Matter (2020) built a reputation for weight, unease, and live force. Then the silence set in.

On September 25, 2026, that silence broke. Their fifth album, simply called Moloken, arrived via Discouraged Records, Bonebag Records and Majestic Mountain Records — digital, CD, and vinyl limited to 250 copies. It is the first full-length in six years, and the self-title is deliberate. After nineteen years, the band is letting go of what Moloken was supposed to be and finding out what it can become.

The record was a long, broken path. Recording began in 2022. In 2023 their label went bankrupt and much of the work had to be restarted. The songs were written around death, rebirth, and whatever might come after. Only after the album was finished did death arrive close to home: Patrik’s mother, Kristoffer’s grandfather, other relatives. None of those losses wrote the record. They made the finished thing feel surreal. Kristoffer has described it as both an ending and a beginning — the weight, darkness, and mystery that have always been Moloken, plus beauty, folk melody, and things the band had never done.

That is the sonic turn. Moloken returns to a more primal, doom-laden foundation and opens the palette: clean vocals for the first time, acoustic passages, and traces of Nordic folk. The themes are the burden of consciousness, death, and eternity. The press framing is a journey through a Nordic mythscape, deeper into a dense forest. What first feels inviting turns disorienting. When the illusion breaks, you are alone with your own thoughts, and only a faint light beyond the fear.

Seven tracks, about 39 minutes:

1. The Burden of Our Awareness — a short, ominous threshold
2. Eternal Sleep — nearly ten minutes of bass-and-drum pressure, post-metal crossing into something closer to post-punk dread
3. 21.12.21 — a galloping, tidal piece the band has carried since an earlier single
4. Fault Line — clean voice against walls of sound, then a crushing refrain; written from a friendship that unraveled
5. Fragments of Dark Matter — the shadow of the previous album, recast
6. En lek med döden — “a game with death”; acid-folk fingerpicking and unease
7. A Night Vision Revealed (Asterion, Pt. I) — the closer, a retelling of the Minotaur in his labyrinth, and the first place the clean vocals fully exposed the band

Early notices have called it an ideal entry point: ferocious live energy translated to record, cookie-monster roar set against textured clean passages, filtered through a lens that does not sound indebted to Cult of Luna, Mastodon, or anyone else in the northern post-metal orbit. It is music meant to be felt, and it reaches full force on stage. The release show is House of Metal in Umeå, November 6–7, 2026, with further dates to follow.