Style: Progressive rock, post-rock (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Gazpacho, Porcupine Tree, Anthaema, Airbag (the Norwegian one)
Country: United Kingdom
Release date: 19 June 2026

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There’s this phenomenon in online spaces that we call “posting through it”; when things suck (as many things do at the moment), some turn to social media as a coping mechanism, whether by making posts related to their struggles in hopes of solidarity from the community or by pouring their heart into shitposting just to feel something. In a comparable sense, music is a crucial emotional outlet shared by artists and audiences alike, a mutual way for both parties to confront the sadness, fear, and other horrors that infect their daily lives while ideally keeping up a respectable veneer of plausible deniability. Liminal Sky, our subjects today, describe their work on their Bandcamp page thus: “…debut album All Tomorrow’s Darkness transforms grief, insomnia and the bleak stillness of the English countryside into widescreen, melancholic post-rock.” In combination with their Facebook profile which comes emblazoned with a literal memento mori, listing “everyone dies” after the two band members’ names in the page header, a glimpse of the musicians’ motivations begins to emerge.

The project Liminal Sky represents a novel foray into the performance realm for Jaime Gomez Arellano (a music producer working with such bands as Ghost, Ulver, and Opeth), joined by Daniel Knight with whom he previously collaborated for the short-lived and poorly search-engine-optimized project Messenger.¹ This time around, the duo (and their accompaniment) take on a tone of heavy progressive rock tinged with post-rock melancholy, a blend which seems to be growing in popularity lately with other comparable projects like SubLunar and this year’s new outing from Cellar Noise. All Tomorrow’s Darkness features at various points Kristoffer Rygg, Anders Møller, and Ole Alexander Halstensgård of Ulver, as well as Hexvessel’s Mat McNerney as the main vocal talent, nearly unrecognizable with his all-clean vocals. A litany of other guests contribute odd accents of saxophone, strings, and keyboards—at times jazzy, at times ethereal, and at times not quite certain where this is all going.

With the rotating cast of guest artists, it’s difficult to pin down what makes Liminal Sky sound like Liminal Sky. Despite the heavy presence of Ulver members, either band sounds little like the other. At the same time, there’s a clear difference between the majority of tracks with Matt McNerney’s folksy, slightly gruff vocals compared to Kristoffer Rygg’s few appearances which manifest a deeper and more elegant presence. Still, both performances (along with a single guest vocal spot by Karin Park on “Penance”) share a faded, lo-fi sound quality like a talented but unpolished local band playing in the back room of a hazy bar. Even with those commonalities, curveballs like occasional string features or synths and keyboards (both from Ulver and otherwise) continue to pop up throughout the later tracks and defy whatever expectations had been previously established. “A Solitary Future” gives the clearest picture of Ulver’s involvement with the effervescent backing keyboard part introduced in the second half, but nothing else quite like that bubbly texture appears elsewhere on All Tomorrow’s Darkness.

On the whole, Liminal Sky succeed at describing desolate scenes with their ethereal blend of hazy guitar chords and quavering vocals—fitting for the English landscapes that seeded their inspiration. However, the inconsistency strikes again here, as some tracks seem to fully realize this vision of rural solitude while others feel like half-baked demos that could have done with another couple editing passes. It’s hard to find any one clear culprit for the less satisfying parts of All Tomorrow’s Darkness. Ulver’s contributions make for some of the strongest and most memorable moments throughout the album (like the aforementioned “A Solitary Future”), but the tracks without their presence also include some of the better outings like “Some Other Time” and “Forget Me Not.” McNerney’s singing at times forms the emotional heart of Liminal Sky’s sound, bringing much-needed feeling to the sparse soundscapes, but in other instances (such as “In Some Secret Universe” or “All Tomorrow’s Darkness”) his slightly off-pitch delivery combined with the lackluster simplicity of the vocal part’s composition push the aesthetic over the line from artfully barren into frustratingly scant. The backing instrumental performances offer little to fall back on in these cases: settled in the middle ground as they are, Liminal Sky present neither the exquisite vacancy of proper post-rock nor the carefully crafted emotional layers of top-tier heavy prog like Riverside. In this case, moderation may not be the answer.

There exists far too much grief in the world for any of us to bear it alone. More than merely posting through it, Liminal Sky convey an intensely real and relatable sense of melancholy through their music; perhaps by sharing it, they can lighten the load somewhat. Buoyed by guest appearances from Ulver and beyond, All Tomorrow’s Darkness presents a true community effort at expressing the everyday struggles of contemporary life. No matter how expressive, though, the album wavers in the quality of its composition and performances. Whether due to the expansive and inconsistent ensemble or simply the primary duo’s lack of experience with this side of the recording booth, all the emotional peaks come paired with equal depressions of unfocused or imperfectly executed musicianship. Maybe that makes the imagery of rural England all the more authentic, but authentic or not, listeners may prefer only some of tomorrow’s darkness in lieu of the full course.

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Recommended tracks: Some Other Time, A Solitary Future, Forget Me Not, The Weight of Heaven
You may also like: Echoes and Signals, SubLunar, Cellar Noise, Messenger²
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Karisma Records

Liminal Sky is:
– Daniel Knight (guitars, bass, keyboards)
– Jaime Gomez Arellano (drums, guitars, keyboards)
With guests:
– Mat McNerney (vocals)
– Kristoffer Rygg (vocals, percussion and effects)
– Karin Park (vocals, “Penance”)
– Daniel O’Sullivan (vocals, “All Tomorrow’s Darkness”)
– Lars Horntveth (saxophone, synths, lapsteel)
– Alicia Nurho (violin, viola)
– Anders Møller (percussion)
– Tore Ylwizaker (piano, “In Some Secret Universe”)
– Ole Alexander Halstensgård (keyboards, “A Solitary Future” and “In Some Secret Universe”)
– Matt Rozeik (synths, “A Solitary Future”)

1. If you want to look up this particular Messenger, look for the albums Illusory Blues or Threnodies, otherwise it’s completely impossible to separate their music from multiple other artists with the same name on streaming platforms. ↩︎
2. See above. ↩︎