Some albums arrive with the weight of lived experience so palpable you feel it before the first note has fully sounded. All Tomorrow’s Darkness, the debut record from Liminal Sky, is one of those albums. It does not ask for your attention so much as quietly command it, drawing you into a sound that is vast, still, and saturated with the kind of grief that does not resolve — only changes shape over time.
The darkness named in the title is not metaphorical. It is the specific, inescapable darkness of losing someone suddenly, or gradually, or both at once.
The album opens with Some Other Time, the first single, a song written in the shadow of two kinds of loss running simultaneously, one sudden, one slow. McNerney’s vocal performance sets the tone immediately: this is not the tortured expressionism of extreme music, nor the confessional rawness of singer-songwriter territory. It occupies a more unsettled, indeterminate space, grief rendered as atmosphere rather than statement.
A Solitary Future introduces Kristoffer Rygg to proceedings, and the fit is intuitive. There is something in the Ulver vocalist’s delivery that has always suggested enormous distance — the sense of someone observing suffering from within it, simultaneously inside the emotion and removed from it. That quality serves the track’s exploration of mental solitude and the inability to outrun one’s own mind with quiet devastating effect.
In Some Secret Universe marks the album deepening into its own atmosphere. The arrangement here is more expansive, guitars building through patient repetition toward a climax that earns its emotional release precisely because it has been held back long enough.
McNerney’s lyrical instincts are at their strongest in this middle section of the record his words articulating interior states that resist ordinary language, the album’s thematic concern with memory, dissolution and presence rendered in lines that resonate without over-explaining themselves.
Forget Me Not carries its title’s weight openly. Whether read as a flower, a plea, or a command, the phrase contains within it the central anxiety of watching someone’s memory and identity disappear. McNerney inhabits that ambiguity with care, and the music around him characteristically unhurried, Gomez and Knight resisting the temptation to dramatize when restraint serves better provides the space for the words to land at full weight. It is one of the album’s most quietly devastating moments.
Penance brings Årabrot’s Karin Park into the fold, and the effect is immediate and galvanising. Where McNerney and Rygg move through the album with a kind of sustained control, Park’s contribution carries a more physical, embodied quality the sense of someone for whom expression is an act rather than a statement. The track shifts the album’s emotional register perceptibly, introducing a harder, rawer edge that makes the surrounding stillness feel even more present by contrast.
The Weight Of Heaven sees Rygg return, the pairing of his voice with the album’s most explicitly spiritual subject matter feeling entirely right. There is something about the way the track holds its harmonic tension without resolving it that captures the particular anguish of faith under pressure — the weight of the title an unmistakeable double meaning, heaven here as burden as much as aspiration. Alongside A Solitary Future, it represents Rygg’s finest work in a guest context.
Algebra Of Unknowing is the album’s most structurally ambitious piece it’s a track that moves through several distinct phases without ever feeling fragmented, the transitions managed with a fluency that speaks to Gomez Arellano’s production intelligence and Knight’s compositional instincts. The title itself is one of the album’s most resonant images: grief as an equation with no fixed solution, the variables shifting each time you think you’ve arrived at an answer. McNerney’s words here are among his finest on the record.
Oar On The Mooring offers something like stillness before the final movement. An image of suspension, the oar placed but not yet used, the vessel held but not yet committed to departure the track captures the paralysis that profound grief can induce with a musical patience that mirrors its subject exactly. It is not a quiet track so much as a suspended one, held in a moment of not-yet, and the effect is quietly extraordinary.
The title track closes the album, and it does so with the particular gravity of something that understands what it is concluding. O’Sullivan’s contribution alongside McNerney gives the track a quality of dialogue two voices moving through the same darkness from different positions, neither offering the other resolution, both sustaining a presence through the final minutes of a record that has earned the right to close on ambiguity rather than false comfort.
All Tomorrow’s Darkness is a debut album in name only. In every other sense it is a fully realised work from musicians who have served long enough in difficult terrain to know precisely what they are doing and why. Gomez Arellano and Knight have built something here that is genuinely rare: an album that processes grief without exploiting it, that achieves beauty without prettifying pain, and that assembles an extraordinary cast of collaborators without losing its own coherent voice in the process.
This is not easy listening. It is not intended to be. But for those willing to sit with it — to let the album’s slow architecture do its work without rushing toward the exit.
All Tomorrow’s Darkness is one of the most moving and meticulously crafted records to emerge from the heavy music adjacent world this year. A landmark debut, and a deeply human document. 9/10
Forget Me Not carries its title’s weight openly. Whether read as a flower, a plea, or a command, the phrase contains within it the central anxiety of watching someone’s memory and identity disappear. McNerney inhabits that ambiguity with care, and the music around him characteristically unhurried, Gomez and Knight resisting the temptation to dramatize when restraint serves better provides the space for the words to land at full weight. It is one of the album’s most quietly devastating moments.
Penance brings Årabrot’s Karin Park into the fold, and the effect is immediate and galvanising. Where McNerney and Rygg move through the album with a kind of sustained control, Park’s contribution carries a more physical, embodied quality the sense of someone for whom expression is an act rather than a statement. The track shifts the album’s emotional register perceptibly, introducing a harder, rawer edge that makes the surrounding stillness feel even more present by contrast.
The Weight Of Heaven sees Rygg return, the pairing of his voice with the album’s most explicitly spiritual subject matter feeling entirely right. There is something about the way the track holds its harmonic tension without resolving it that captures the particular anguish of faith under pressure — the weight of the title an unmistakeable double meaning, heaven here as burden as much as aspiration. Alongside A Solitary Future, it represents Rygg’s finest work in a guest context.
Algebra Of Unknowing is the album’s most structurally ambitious piece it’s a track that moves through several distinct phases without ever feeling fragmented, the transitions managed with a fluency that speaks to Gomez Arellano’s production intelligence and Knight’s compositional instincts. The title itself is one of the album’s most resonant images: grief as an equation with no fixed solution, the variables shifting each time you think you’ve arrived at an answer. McNerney’s words here are among his finest on the record.
Oar On The Mooring offers something like stillness before the final movement. An image of suspension, the oar placed but not yet used, the vessel held but not yet committed to departure the track captures the paralysis that profound grief can induce with a musical patience that mirrors its subject exactly. It is not a quiet track so much as a suspended one, held in a moment of not-yet, and the effect is quietly extraordinary.
The title track closes the album, and it does so with the particular gravity of something that understands what it is concluding. O’Sullivan’s contribution alongside McNerney gives the track a quality of dialogue two voices moving through the same darkness from different positions, neither offering the other resolution, both sustaining a presence through the final minutes of a record that has earned the right to close on ambiguity rather than false comfort.
All Tomorrow’s Darkness is a debut album in name only. In every other sense it is a fully realised work from musicians who have served long enough in difficult terrain to know precisely what they are doing and why. Gomez Arellano and Knight have built something here that is genuinely rare: an album that processes grief without exploiting it, that achieves beauty without prettifying pain, and that assembles an extraordinary cast of collaborators without losing its own coherent voice in the process.
This is not easy listening. It is not intended to be. But for those willing to sit with it — to let the album’s slow architecture do its work without rushing toward the exit.
All Tomorrow’s Darkness is one of the most moving and meticulously crafted records to emerge from the heavy music adjacent world this year. A landmark debut, and a deeply human document. 9/10
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