Review: Giant Sky – GIANTSKY III
Artwork by: Erlend Viken
Style: Symphonic Prog, Psychedelic Rock, Post-Progressive Rock, Orchestral Film Scores (Clean Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Premiata Forneria Marconi, The Final Cut by Pink Floyd, Max Richter’s Recompositions of The Four Seasons by Vivaldi, Swans
Country: Norway
Release date: 2 October 2026
I generally bristle when I hear people use the adjective “cinematic” to describe anything that isn’t a movie. To me, it implies that the value of one medium is somehow improved by its ability to resemble another. See Dream Theater’s The Astonishing, an album I really like1 that nevertheless exerts too much energy elevating narrative, tone, and mood over strengthening and developing each song and the whole they make together. The music floats around the same ideas with limited space for creative invention that takes the listener by surprise, making tracks feel samey. Too often, music deemed “cinematic” always flirts with prioritizing all of the elements that aren’t music over the music itself.
Giant Sky are no strangers to this notion. Led by Erlend Viken, the band’s first two albums have a Muse-like tendency to establish context for every shift, pattern, and note until songs swell full to bursting before coming back down again. Their paths are plotted like story beats: exposition, rising action, climax, resolution. The results on GIANTSKY I and II were uneven; the former was spacey, labyrinthine, and folksy but often felt formulated rather than organic. The latter was more energized, with driving nods to Deafheaven’s Infinite Granite (fun!) and genuflections to Muse (yawn2), interspersed with banjos and synth modulators that made the most of its more—hacking cough—cinematic tendencies.
For better and worse, GIANTSKY III takes more from the debut in sonics and tone, emphasizing a pacing that is at best thoughtful and at worst languid. “Mundane Morning” kicks things off with aplomb: folksy acoustic guitar strum over spaced-out synths, while Viken’s placid vocals “Encourage you to travel inwards.” He croons obliquely about isolation and detachment, juxtaposing poetic turns of phrase like “Mundane morning, cracking hearts, shells in the glass you broke,” against timely references to “YouTube-nights, no one here.” His singing hovers somewhere between Neal Morse’s ragged radio sing-along and Roger Waters’ caffeinated monotone delivery. Electric guitars streak across the soundscape like shooting stars as the bass rallies; drums settle into a frenetic groove; and synths twinkle like stardust.
As it segues into “Nothing to Forgive Nothing to Forget,” with its vocal phrasing and tough-walking bassline evoking Chris Squire’s “Lucky Seven,” I realized that while Giant Sky may be reaching for the cinematic, the effect feels more like staring into the night sky from an observatory. And like stargazing, GIANTSKY III offers awe-inspiring splendor, tepid boredom, and fruitless searching in roughly equal measure. Nothing quite reaches the heights of “Mundane Morning,” that first glimpse at the stars and the infinite expanse they promise. In part because different angles on black expanses of space and time eventually begin to resemble one another.
That’s the catch. Across three albums, Giant Sky have established a clear identity, meshing ’70s psych-prog with post-rock drone, the studio calisthenics of Muse and The Mars Volta, expansive film-score orchestration, and a cursory tip of the hat to English folk. The problem is that nearly every track contains nearly every one of these elements, simply reordered toward different ends. Sometimes even the ends are indistinguishable. “Nothing to Forgive” builds into a wonderfully jazz-driven outro before the two-track snoozefest of “Limerence” and “All the Rage,” both beginning with gently plucked acoustic guitar beneath the spiderweb-like vocals of guest artist Myrtoula Roe. Beautiful orchestrations swell through both, and the production is immaculate, but after repeated listens I still struggled to remember what happened where. “Reveries of Gold” follows and injects a sense of life again, but its overreliance on the same orchestral crescendos and diminuendos provides no different of a texture, even if the music is now in a major key instead of a minor, resulting in a song that sounds like a souped-up Coldplay tribute.
“Sun World” compounds the problem. Again: Roe’s hushed vocals. Again: restrained instrumentation. Again: swelling and deflating layers of synths and guitars, this time joined by an oddly placed banjo that sounds like Nora Brown wandered into the wrong studio. Before that transition, I was halfway ready to play the new Deafheaven EP over another set of speakers just to create the tension this album so desperately needs.
I should state that what Viken and company have built here is astonishing in its own right, but not always conducive to an engaging listening experience. The whole has gotten in the way of the parts. Individual ideas shine for seconds, sometimes minutes, before being ushered aside for–say the line, Bart–spiderweb-like vocals, hushed instrumentation, and swelling-then-deflating orchestration. The banjo at the end of “Sun World” is a perfect example. So is the mesmerizing, jazz-heavy intro to “Fleeting Glimpse.” As a sophisticated listener, these brief reprieves made me recall the early SpongeBob episode where Squidward’s interpretive dance earns flying tomatoes while SpongeBob receives rapturous applause for walking onstage with a mop.
Such a comparison is unfair though, and I get that. There are pieces of something great buried beneath the lush production and grandiose performances, and changing Giant Sky’s approach too much would mean neutering the very identity they’ve cultivated. Stargazing, after all, requires patience, repetition, and empty space.
Meeting GIANTSKY III on those terms helped. “Mundane Morning” may be worth the price of admission alone. The lyrics, cryptic and vague, can be powerfully evocative, giving off shades of Steven Wilson at his best. But the album ultimately falls short of the image it creates for itself. The songs function as parts cleaved from a whole that was envisioned before anything was written, that slouch towards some predestined design that robs them of the very power they seek to demonstrate. Listening to GIANTSKY III is like looking at an arm of the Milky Way without knowing what stars are: you understand the grandeur before you can distinguish the individual lights.
One lyric from ‘Mundane Morning’ has stuck with me: ‘Follow through, fall apart, resurface.’ Viken sings it on a descending scale, the words tumbling out like a mantra, and it’s as neat a summary of GIANTSKY III as any. This album wanders about its own empty space for too long, and repetition that should feel hypnotic starts to feel like floating in zero gravity—yet there is always something, some wrinkle in the sonics, a clever lyric, or surprising musical interlude that flashes across like a falling star. For what it’s worth, GIANTSKY III is part one of a two part album, so maybe there is something in the recently released sequel to give Part I more shape, more sense, more purpose. On its own merits, though, GIANTSKY III is an album that’s a lot easier to respect than it is to love.
Recommended Tracks: Mundane Morning, Nothing to Forgive Nothing to Forget, Fleeting Glimpse
You may also like: Fish On Friday, Active Child, Cathedral
Final verdict: 6/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Instagram
Label: Independent / Imaginary Friend Records
Giant Sky is:
– Erlend Viken (Drums (Outro 2, 4, Opening 6), vocals, guitars, bass, keys, noise, percussion, banjo)
With:
– Andreas Kjøl Berg / drums (Except: Outro 2, 4, Opening 6, 8)
– Espen Berge / drums (8)
– Myrtoula Røe / vocals
– Tuva Halse / violin
– Jonas Viken / violin
– Astrid Hoffman-Tollaa / cello
– Øystein Megård / guitar (1st Part 8)
– Hogne Galåen / guitar (Outro 7)
– Stuart Braithwaite / guitars (8)
