KATATONIA: Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State – Album Review

10th June 2025 0 By Jon Deaux

This isn’t your cousin’s doom metal. This is dream-warped, clinically depressive art-rock sculpted with such surgical precision that it makes most modern prog sound like toddlers bashing Casio keyboards at a ketamine disco.

Jonas Renkse voice is less an instrument than an omnipresent fog rolling across your chest at 3 a.m. while you’re mid-panic attack, revisiting every mistake you made in 2009.

From the opener Thrice, it’s clear they’ve weaponized restraint. That’s the sound of taste. No need to drop into blast beats or scream over recycled Meshuggah riffs like so many tech-death dilettantes choking on their own fretboards.KATATONIA breathe. They brood. They smother you slow. It’s an expensive pillow in a luxury hotel room where you go to die dramatically.

Warden pulses with the kind of sophistication that makes most rock bands look like they’re huffing glue in a garage.

Lilac is the sonic equivalent of watching your ex marry someone else while it starts to snow

Wind of No Change is where they start flexing their post-human melancholia muscles.There’s no TikTok bait, no stadium-core clap-alongs, no AI-pop hook surgically installed behind your left eye. Just long, frostbitten tunnels of sound that don’t care if you come along or get left behind

.Efter Solen is sung in Swedish, because English isn’t good enough for this. It’s minimalist, but every note hits like a Scandinavian therapist staring deep into your soul and quietly judging your emotional immaturity. I almost forgave Sweden for ABBA.

If you’re the kind of cretin who asks if they still “sound like Opeth,” you deserve to be trapped in a Forever 21 changing room soundtracked by Coldplay.

Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State is brilliant. Not that your opinion matters. But mine does. Now go listen to it and pretend you’ve always liked them.
Score 8/10
Track List