Style: Progressive Metal, Djent, Post-Rock (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Owane, Distant Dream, Sithu Aye
Country: Poland
Release date: 16 January 2026

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For those who don’t know, almost exactly a year ago our wonderful blog went from covering exclusively prog artists below twenty thousand monthly Spotify listeners to the full range of progressive music, underground or not. Obviously we’ve covered titans of prog metal like Dream Theater, Between the Buried and Me, and, erm… Poppy, but a stranger “overground” niche of music is now available for us to cover that wasn’t before. One such artist is Poland’s Widek, who currently sits at twenty-five thousand monthly listeners—while we internally classify him as overground, he’s certainly underground in the grand scheme of things, with only a cult following. I’ve been one of those cult followers of the progressive/post-/djent rock/metal guitarist for years now, patiently waiting for Entrance to Eternity after a seven year hiatus, so was the album worth the wait? Should Widek crack into the true overground?

Superfans of the project should rejoice because Entrance into Eternity is more of the same. Airy production leaves the guitars, the focal point of the album, room to shine with spacey tones. The djent is crunchy, and the cleaner guitar parts have a sleek, fresh tone which expands to fill the atmospheric sonic space. Often breathtakingly beautiful, each Widek song varies in texture frequently; largely, the inertia of tracks rolls in the way of syncopated djent chugs into open-string tremolo strumming à la Distant Dream. The tremolos abandon the heavier tone for a non-distorted one, providing a levity to the song that feels like floating through space and time, and the juxtaposition of the two main modes creates a nice sense of post-metal tension. You know the thumping djent is about to break into a shower of bright guitars—it’s just a matter of when. “Falling into the Void” and “Beyond the Edge of Time” are strongest on this front, as the former uses the album’s heaviest riff before the heavenly shower of tremolos, the latter being the longest and, thereby, engaging with song structures more.

Guitar solos—of which there are a plethora from Widek and his seven guest guitarists—flow sweetly in a rich chocolate lava cake tone, many clearly influenced by the likes of Plini, but each with the performer’s distinct melodic identity. As the only contributor featured on more than one track, fellow Pole Gru¹ lays down solos on three, and his cosmic djent and solo style of ever-circling arpeggios gels with Widek’s composition as smoothly as his fingers glide across the fretboard. The other big-name guests, Sithu Aye and Per Nilsson (Scar Symmetry), provide—unsurprisingly—strong solos to their allotted tracks, although neither is particularly inspired. Nilsson’s solo on finale, “Beyond the Edge of Time,” does provide an interesting voice to the track, though, because his melodeath playstyle is far removed from the jazz fusion and djent guitarists populating the rest of Entrance into Eternity.

First impressions are, of course, extremely important, and Entrance into Eternity left a positive one as I let the riffs and solos baptize me. But, when I listened closer, every track became strangely the exact same. Not once does the record vary from djent, trem picking, or guitar solos, and they’re used in the same predictable structure every time—the sole track with an intriguing structure, “Beyond the Edge of Time,” ends on a fadeout, automatically cheapening the effect of its eight-minute runtime. Entrance into Eternity is a beautiful album, but it’s rather vapid, as well.

Listening to an album and initially thinking “hey, that’s great stuff,” only to focus on it and be whelmed is uncanny; but, as soon as I lose focus again, Entrance into Eternity goes back to being a fun listen. I realize that previous Widek releases were like this, too, but the pattern is even more pronounced now. Beyond just the gap between releases, I think the similarity in structures is the clear reason why Widek doesn’t pull in the listeners of Plini or even Owane, but listening to him is always enjoyable—just don’t focus too closely.

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Recommended tracks: Fragments of Forever, Falling Into The Void, Beyond The Edge of Time
You may also like: Gru, Modern Day Babylon, Pomegranate Tiger, Chimp Spanner
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Widek is:
– Widek (everything)
With guests:
– Gru (tracks 1, 2, 4)
– Sithu Aye (track 3)
– Morgan Thomaso (track 5)
– Paul Wardingham (track 6)
– Marco Sfogli (track 7)
– Brunno Henrique (track 8)
– Per Nilsson (track 9)

1. Widek’s albums are also the only place to hear Gru anymore, who released a masterful instrudjental album, Cosmogenesis, in 2010, and then dipped from anything but Widek projects. ↩︎