The more I hear from this band the more I'm convinced that Pelagial was a massive fluke.
How exactly did you come to this conclusion?
Pelagial's the first album I heard from them and I instantly loved it. To this day it might be my favorite concept album. The concept is great and they executed it super well - the music is varied, has a lot of emotion, and the flow and pacing of the entire record is fantastic. I love how it gets progressively darker as the record goes on (the sudden turn the album takes right before Signals of Anxiety starts still gives me chills), and the ending is super satisfying not only because it's fittingly the heaviest and darkest song on the album, but the entire record was building up to it the entire time.
Anyways, with how much I loved that record, I've tried checking their other stuff out several times and each time I've been really disappointed. Neither part of Precambrian did anything for me, and Heliocentric just felt like a bunch of dry, sterile, mid-tempo nothingness. I'm still going to check out the new record when it comes out, but this song just sounded like more Heliocentric to me. If it's actually supposed to be about the Permian-Triassic extinction event, basically the most apocalyptic event in the history of the planet so far, why does it sound so reserved? What happened to the earth-shattering emotion and heaviness of the last two songs on Pelagial? *Those* songs sound like the entire fucking world is ending. Wouldn't that have been so fitting for a concept like this? The intentional clipping during the end is neat, but it's not enough, and Devise by David Maxim Micic did the same thing but a billion times better. I don't know, maybe I need to give the rest of their discography more of a chance, but compared to my first experience with the band it just feels so lackluster.