Style: Progressive metal, djent, jazz fusion (Instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Intervals, Sithu Aye, Arch Echo, The Helix Nebula
Country: Australia
Release date: 24 April 2026

---

The development of styles and subgenres is made possible by the parallel development of the artists who participate in them. Plini, as one of the original “bedroom” solo guitar artists, has had more than a decade to watch his musical career and the genre as a whole mature and develop into new forms. An Unnameable Desire is the latest stop on this unfolding journey, immediately recognizable as a Plini album by its fundamental composition, replete with sparkling, technical guitar work and almost imperceptible subtleties of rhythm. At the same time, the melodic elements that define the characteristic mood and emotional resonance of Plini’s music feel absent, or at least heavily diminished. The Hieronymus Bosch-like cover art perfectly represents this album’s inherent self-contradiction—perfectly on brand as a busy collage of miscellaneous objects, yet uncharacteristic for Plini with its unsettling aesthetic. After all these years, is Plini even the same artist as when his career began?

It may be difficult, or even impossible, for any artist to remain unchanged over such a long period, but Plini’s specific evolution bears dissecting given how central it is to my experience of his latest album. Handmade Cities originally won me over (and remains one of my all-time favorite albums) because of how it demonstrates the depth available in instrumental music. With An Unnameable Desire, Plini no longer seems interested in pursuing the complex yet expressive aesthetic that defined his early work, focusing instead on showcasing flashy vertical slices. Tracks like “Ciel” and “After Everything” come across as vapid and poppy in their delivery, centering on bright, catchy, repetitive licks which sound impressive at first, but quickly lose their appeal. It reminds me of Regressor’s more recent EPs, which trade hearty intricacies for empty, fleeting stimulation as if giving up vegetables for candy. Other entries, mainly “Canyon” and “Manala,” just sound unsatisfyingly messy and chaotic. Again, at a surface level these tracks are technically impressive with their unparseable time signatures and lightning-fast strumming and drumbeats, but more exposure leads to a sense that the music just happens at you for a while without any intention until the piece wraps up unceremoniously. Is this approach experimental, or does it just miss the mark? Any fan of non-mainstream music genres must ask themselves this question from time to time when the line between artistic ambition and overreach gets especially blurry.

The oxymoronic description “hard easy listening” on Plini’s Bandcamp page captures this conflict well. While the content of An Unnameable Desire is structurally simple and easy to digest, the insistence on making everything flashy and technical invites the worst of both worlds by making the listener work hard just to unravel a messy skein of music that, in the end, turns out to be either shallow and unrewarding, or too inscrutable to be very meaningful. Much of the album consists of the same core formula: percussion keeping time with simple marching beats; bass or rhythm guitar chugging the same note or simple chord ad nauseam; and a short repeated riff or melodic phrase sitting on top. Consider the title track with its steady, plodding beat kept up by the piano and/or bass drum. Licks of guitar, synth, and various symphonic guest instruments drop in sporadically, harnessing the lack of any clear time signature to produce wild unexpected flourishes. And yet, without that sense of guiding structure (beyond the most basic beat itself), the effect is more to confuse than to amaze. Why this rhythm here? Why that instrumentation there? The compositional choices may not be the wrong ones, but only because the context is too thin to tell right from wrong at all.

My first couple times listening to An Unnameable Desire were challenging, to be blunt. While I haven’t necessarily “enjoyed” further explorations more than the first spin, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the album’s deeply rhythmic qualities. Where I feel an absence of the melodic substance that made earlier Plini works so captivating, there isn’t really a void; the space has been filled with a different—but also technically impressive—kind of rhythmic creativity. “Now & Then” plays with fast, intricate rhythms and quirky synth effects, finally paying off the vision that the entire first half of the album had been trying (and failing) to realize. “Vespertine” and “Ruin” together concoct a satisfying return to the “classic Plini” style with their renewed focus on arpeggiated guitar melodies and supportive harmonies from the keyboard and bass. This brief reversion raises the question: why can’t we still have both? Plini’s music has always been renowned for its technical complexity, and the efforts to dial that complexity up even further in his latest works seems to come at the needless expense of other crucial elements. These two tracks by themselves achieve more in the realms of both brain-tickling rhythmic prowess and heart-fluttering emotional scenery than the rest of An Unnameable Desire combined, and with that perspective the complete product feels all the more needlessly self-limited.

Djent, particularly of the instrumental variety, gets a lot of flak from the community for being generic or samey. I’ve always felt that this follows a somewhat tautological line of thinking: artists who stick to retreading the same paths do indeed sound much the same as each other, but many djent bands—including founding contributors like Plini—still play with meaningful originality. In the arc of his career, Plini has morphed from a groundbreaking artist to something almost indistinguishable from his own imitators. An Unnameable Desire reflects the core struggles of its own maturing genre, shuddering with the tension between replicating known successes and continuing to reinvent the familiar style.

---

Recommended tracks: Now & Then, Vespertine, Ruin
You may also like: Regressor, Asymmetric Universe, earth7, Feather, StarSystems
Final verdict: 5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Plini is:
– Plini (everything)
With guests:
– Simon Grove (bass, guitars)
– Chris Allison (drums, percussion)
– Dave Mackay (piano, keyboards, synths)
– John Vaugh (saxophone, “An Unnameable Desire”; flutes, “After Everything”)
– A.J. Minette (string arrangements)
– Misha Vayman (violin)
– Yoshi Masuda (cello)
– Jakub Zytecki (guitar solo, “Ciel”)
– Emily Hopkins (harp, “After Everything”)