Style: Post-black metal, blackgaze (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Deafheaven, Alcest, Astronoid, Møl
Country: Arizona, United States
Release date: 11 February 2026

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Post-black metal has long flirted with the language of dreams. The blastbeats remain, the rasped vocals still claw at the air, but they’re often suspended in atmosphere—washed in reverb, stretched into a weightless yet fully formed introspection. For many listeners, that dreamlike quality is metaphorical. For me, it’s something closer to literal. I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do, they’re fleeting impressions rather than the vivid, cinematic narratives others describe. Music is where my subconscious does its wandering. It’s where I drift.

That makes an album like Fourth Dimensional Dreamscape particularly resonant. The sixth full-length from the Arizona blackgaze project Nullingroots contrasts the dream and waking worlds, meditates on the fragility of memory and identity, and vulnerably approaches isolation and a fear of being forgotten. Wrapping those themes in dreamy, riff-centric black metal feels less like a genre choice and more like a logical necessity, as the music inhabits that slippery space between sleep and consciousness.

“In Reverie’s Embrace” is the standout in this regard. Its downplayed intro steps into an emotive verse, distorted guitars swelling, scraping vocals devouring glass, as a dolce synth dances atop the soundscape like a half-remembered melody that you can’t quite place. The sequence is a frisson-inducing concoction of melancholic blackgaze that, most impressively, still has riffs underlying everything instead of merely the furiously strummed chords that the genre tends to lean on. That distinction matters more than it might seem. Where many blackgaze records use atmosphere as a substitute for composition, Nullingroots uses it as dressing, requiring the songs and compositions to have bones.

The album’s dreamy haze comes at a cost, though. Fourth Dimensional Dreamscape is, at times, a little too comfortable in its own atmosphere. Its songs don’t have distinct personalities so much as they share thoughts, bleeding their emotions and themes into one another. The prog half of my brain absolutely loves that aspect, but the stank face half is left searching for more individual footholds to grip onto as standouts. That’s not a knock on the craft. Taken as a whole, the album is genuinely lovely in that blackgaze way—an immersive, blissful drifting that rewards surrender more than scrutiny. The challenge is that “surrender to the whole” is a harder thing to point to than a killer riff or a moment that stops you cold. In this dream, you get the former in abundance and the latter only sparingly.

Fourth Dimensional Dreamscape closes with its longest and most patient statement. “The Optimist” sprawls across nearly fourteen minutes, and works to earn its length. Arriving with an initial surge before transitioning through several tempo changes, it nonetheless maintains an affective stasis throughout. Here, if nowhere else, the album’s sense of sameness becomes undeniable. Despite the song moving through these different sections and tempos, the mood does not change. Compounding the deja vu is the song’s black metal snarl that hasn’t wavered across the record’s entire runtime. Yet, even though the weight of the emotional repetition lingers, the track’s back half brilliantly unfolds into a release and fade that is more akin to a gradual return to the waking world than an ending. It’s bittersweet in the way that good dreams are bittersweet—the edges softening as awareness creeps in and the border between the real and the dreamed begins to blur.

That an album so preoccupied with blurred boundaries offers so few landmarks by which to navigate is fitting, if at times frustrating. You could be dropped anywhere into Fourth Dimensional Dreamscape, carried through a passage or two, and set back down somewhere entirely different without ever feeling disoriented—because it all feels like the same place. Though that is surely the point, it became a limitation on my repeated listens. Either way, Fourth Dimensional Dreamscape lingers the way my sparing dreams do—not as a sequence of events I can recount in order, but as a mood that stays with me after the details have gone soft. I rarely remember my dreams, but I remember how they felt.

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Recommended tracks: In Reverie’s Embrace, Fourth Dimensional Dreamscape, The Optimist
You may also like: Unverkalt, Genune, Karg
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Nullingroots is:
– Cameron Boesch (guitars, bass, vocals, programming)
– Alex Haddad (guitars, bass, vocals, programming)

1. Also known as Moonroot Art ↩︎