Donor – Jeviště snů – Album Review

23rd April 2025 0 By Jon Deaux

Ever had your bones rattled by a sound so dense, so unrelenting, it feels like a haunted vending machine full of anvils trying to tell you its trauma in Morse code? That’s Jeviště snů the latest offering by Donor —a Czech metal album that sounds like Kafka’s The Trial being adapted for stage by Slipknot and performed entirely in a collapsing steel mill.

This isn’t just metal. This is metal that knows it’s metal and still tries to transcend itself. It’s like watching a welder sculpt a cathedral from barbed wire while chain-smoking Sartre quotes.

The first track Divadlo snů didn’t “drop” so much as detonate. The drums sound like someone let God play Jenga with trash cans during a lightning storm. I had flashbacks to when I was nine and stuck my finger in a broken amp to see what would happen—spoiler: this album happens.

And the vocals? Imagine Werner Herzog having a breakdown in a meat locker, except it’s not Herzog, it’s someone far more deranged, and instead of words, it’s guttural truths barked from the bottom of an existential ravine. I don’t speak Czech, but I felt the lyrics in my dental fillings.

There are guitar solos that sound like Yngwie Malmsteen after three Red Bulls and a nihilistic epiphany. Notes spiral like wasps drunk on gasoline, but land with the precision of a ballet dancer disarming a landmine.

There are even time signatures that abandon traditional logic and start speaking in riddles. I think they briefly entered 11/13 just to spite music theory professors. I was headbanging but unsure whether I was keeping rhythm or communing with ancient deities of chaos.

By the time the final track stumbled in—part dirge, part galactic flameout—I was ready to light a candle for my eardrums and nominate the snare drum for war crimes. It didn’t end so much as evaporate into a haze of reverb and psychic residue.

This isn’t background music. This is a foreground apocalypse. It makes you reconsider your relationship with sound, language, and gravity. If your Spotify algorithm’s been getting too cozy, throw “Jeviště snů” at it like a Molotov.

And for the love of Lemmy, don’t try saying the title out loud unless you’re prepared for your cat to start speaking Latin or your toaster to file for divorce.
Score 8/10
Track List
01 – Divadlo snů
02 – Amnesia
03 – Krysí král
04 – Zlatý klíč
05 – Dlaně
06 – Bojovníci Boží
07 – Zrcadlo poznání
08 – Válka se nezmění
09 – Svět za obzorem
10 – Derniéra
Label – Smile Music Records
Release – 28th March 2025