Style: Prog Metal, Tool Worship (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Tool, Soen, Karnivool, Wheel, grade school science textbooks
Country: Denmark
Release date: 16 Oct 2026

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An exercise commonly performed in high school science classes helps to explain the expansion of the universe: students inflate a balloon about halfway, draw a few dots on it representing galaxies, and then blow up the balloon further. All of the dots move away from each other. This demonstrates how, for any observer, all galaxies seem to be receding due to the isometric, isotropic expansion of space.¹ This same experiment could be used to demonstrate how a band can create an album with a handful of good ideas, and then inflate the space between them until they are causally disconnected from each other as well as from the context in which they were written, and good taste in general. KINETIC‘s debut LP, Liminal, is a textbook example.

An album or a track being very long does not inherently make it bad, of course. The Beatles‘ White Album is over ninety minutes, and Jethro Tull‘s “Thick as a Brick” clocks in at around forty-five minutes for what is ostensibly a single song. But these works don’t fill space, they expand into it out of necessity. The former is so rich and varied stylistically that the sprawling zoo of ideas seizes nearby temporal territory via eminent domain. The latter builds on every variation of a single idea, spiralling inward and outward infinitely like a musical Mandelbrot set. Neither of these feel like they are filling a pre-allocated chunk of spacetime. Liminal, as its name suggests, seems more to emphasize the space between ideas than the ideas themselves. The album’s press release² suggests this is intentional:

[Liminal] focuses heavily on cinematic arrangements and long-form compositions. This deliberate stylistic choice allows the music to evolve dynamically, ensuring that the sonic landscape mirrors the immense scientific and philosophical themes of the narrative.

Which is fine.³ Like, drone is a thing. But Liminal ain’t drone; rather, it’s an album where each track introduces, on average, one compelling riff or melodic idea, then pads the space around that idea with minutes of pedestrian ones. You could comfortably skip the first two to three minutes of every track and miss very little of the substance of the album. There’s a difference between building a composition gradually through layering and crescendo to create a sense of growth and development, and just wasting the listener’s time. “Journey to the Stars” exemplifies the latter: the track begins with a T-minus ten second countdown that somehow takes one hundred and thirty seconds. There’s a mildly interesting polyrhythmic section at the start of “New Frontiers”, but that mild interest has got to sustain the listener for the next three minutes or so until the more energetic guitar and vocals come in, which is a tall order. Writing a long album doesn’t imply quality or significance — just ask The Flaming Lips.⁴

But just like planets separated by millions of miles of empty space, as we travel through the void of Liminal, we eventually stumble upon something significant. “Beginnings” kicks us off about four minutes in with a powerfully growled “SPACE and TIME is born”; ignoring the subject-verb disagreement (these guys are Danish), this is a muscular debut for the vocals. In fact, the vox are well-controlled and beefy from the beginning to the end of Liminal (with few exceptions⁵), with the closing track “Omega” showcasing a slightly raspy note held for an impressive thirty seconds at the fifteen minute mark. The guitar also provides momentary respite from the endless expanse—a twisting climb-up-climb-down six minutes into “New Frontiers”, a jagged 11/8 section 2:20 into “Omega”, an extended pentatonish serpentine about 4:30 into “2 to Five”—there are rare and precious metals here, but they are beneath a ton of rock.⁶

Astronomer and author Carl Sagan once said “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”.⁷ There is nothing new under the sun, but we mix and meld our influences in order to create something new and fresh. When that process fails, the result feels derivative. KINETIC have failed to fully digest their obvious Tool influence and as a result Liminal often comes across as imitative. At some point in nearly every track on the album there is a section indistinguishable from Parabola or 10,000 Days-era discarded Tool riffs: 1:45 into “Beginnings”, 1:20 into “Evolution”, 9:10 into “New Frontiers”… play something moody and minor-scale in triplets and you’re already halfway to a KINETIC track. A notable difference between this work and its biggest influence is the lack of an imaginative rhythm section. The drums on Liminal are strictly business. They serve the track, but they never impress. The same can be said of the bass, dutifully following the guitar, never branching out to explore its own corner of spacetime. Liminal is a Tool album where half of the band was lobotomized.

Perhaps Liminal is saved by the lyrics? No. Genuinely, the only inspired bit of songwriting on the entire album comes from “Digital Mind”, where the narrator describes the digitization of a human consciousness:

“reborn as frames / of human brains / bits and bytes / I pack your life away”

The first third of the album reads like random excerpts from an eighth grade science textbook:

“superclusters form around supermassive black holes”

“phenotypic alterations change through generations”

“planet dying, it’s scary, right?”

The overarching story is flimsy at best. The first three tracks describe the evolution of stars and galaxies, and then of life on Earth, and then the beginnings of human culture. This human-centered story moves from third-person to first-person during the third track, then stays there. But the narrator becomes an “I” only at the eighth track, “Journey to the Stars”. So it feels like gaslighting when the press release says:

“The entire journey unfolds through a third-person perspective [not true] narrated by a mysterious entity named Tony [is this relevant?]. … The narrative takes a shocking turn during the pivotal track Digital Mind, where Tony is revealed to be a floating entity destined to recount this cosmic history for an unknown eternity. [This is not explained in the actual lyrics.]”

Liminal‘s concept is overly ambitious and poorly executed, to say the least. Combine that with some of the cringiest lines this author has ever heard on a prog record—”from the ocean to the land, fins to feet upon the sand”, “countdown done, ignition ignite”, and (my favourite) a heartily-belted “primordiaaaal souuuuup”—and it makes me wish I didn’t speak English, so I could enjoy the record a bit more.

I can forgive an album for having a dorky concept. I can forgive it for being a bit bloated. I can forgive it for being a bit derivative of one of the biggest prog metal bands of all time. But combining all of those attributes and turning each to 11 moves Liminal from “good but flawed” territory to “nearly unlistenable”. To be sure, there are some good hooks here, there are riffs and vocal lines that get stuck in my head, but those are seconds of a record that has over 6,300 of them. There is too much cruft here, too much bloat, too many flaws to recommend our readers check this one out. KINETIC need to hire a producer who can help them trim the fat and grow their kernels of good ideas into ears of listenable corn-music. Or something. Pretend I wrote a good conclusion. 4.5/10.

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Recommended tracks: Beginnings, New Frontiers, Digital Mind
You may also like: Sermon, Mantra, Derev
Final verdict: 4.5/10

Related links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Eclipse Records

KINETIC is:
– René Hougaard (lead vocals)
– David Thing (guitar, backing vocals)
– Christian Filskov Heitmann (bass)
– Marcus H. Levin (synth)
– Rune Görlitz (drums)

1. This expansion is accelerating — eventually every other galaxy will be moving away from ours at superliminal speeds, deep space will go dark, and in the absence of records from the far past, our distant descendants will be unaware that there is anything at all beyond their own island of stars and planets. ↩︎
2. https://www.eclipserecords.com/release/liminal-kinetic ↩︎
3. …though a bit defensive. It’s a “deliberate stylistic choice”, guys! It’s meant to be bloated! ↩︎
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Skies_H3 ↩︎
5. For example, the vocals crack around eight minutes into “New Frontiers”. The vocalist is, at times, straining. ↩︎
6. Of salesmen! ↩︎
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc ↩︎