Feb 032025
 

(written by Islander)

The Dutch two-man formation All Are To Return describe their creations as “extreme, experimental music with an urgent sense of dread.” They began with a self-titled EP in 2020 and have followed that with three more releases, most recently a 2024 album named AATR III on Tartarus Records. Simply reading the eloquent but harrowing thematic descriptions of these records at Bandcamp demonstrates the duo’s extremely grim, indeed nihilistic, perspectives on humanity’s degraded past and hopeless future.

The music has been in line with those perspectives. It has often generated massive and caustic assaults on the senses, hostile and brutalizing, furious and doomed, sometimes cinematic in its sweep, but also deeply chilling and relentlessly unsettling.

For their most recent effort AATR have created a new audio/visual work named Limen. It consists of four pieces of music, each of them with a video, that present an interconnected narrative. Limen is also intensely disturbing, but represents a variation that makes greater use of haunting and harsh ambient sensations, though the band haven’t abandoned their industrial proclivities. It also again vividly displays the duo’s talent for crafting harrowing poetry.

Late last month the first chapter of the new EP was revealed, and today we’re revealing the fourth one.

That first installment is named “The Augur“, and it had its premiere at The Obelisk. As the video proceeds with its hallucinatory imagery, mysterious words cross the screen, though they’re not heard. They seem to describe the aftermath of a dark ritual that has left shattered screens, burned plastic, the remains of once-prized objects, their purpose now undone, the fragments of a dream.

The music, on the other hand, sounds like the dark ritual in progress. The beats are slow, solemn, and momentous. Eerie whispering sounds glimmer and swirl, vaporous and inhuman. Other tones extravagantly rise and fall, like a massed chorus, like the wordless intonations of worshipers. The experience is chilling, and hypnotic.

On the other end of the EP’s connected narrative lies “That Which Listens“, the track we’re premiering today. The video for this one is more apocalyptic, depicting a clouded sky turned deep red. It too reveals mysterious words across the screen, disconcerting words, and Death seems to loom over them.

The sounds are more apocalyptic too. There’s not much chance of becoming mesmerized by this one. It includes abrasive bursts of sound, like a conjunction of nuclear detonations and lightning strikes, and poisonous radioactive vibrations in their aftermath. Occasionally, agonized voices seem to moan and scream and choke.

Subdued bass tones morosely murmur while these things happen. They might make you think of a long line of huddled figures dismally trudging along through murk and muck toward the end of warmth, or of some dread entity calmly observing the effects of what it has wrought.

In between “The Augur” and “That Which Listens” are two more pieces, “Sujet Maudite” and “The Veil“. They are yet to come. I assume and hope that eventually all of them will be presented as one continuous video and sequence of sounds, though it’s a frightening thing to contemplate. Eventually, it will also be released as a digital EP. Keep an eye on the locations linked below to see what happens next, and when.

MORE INFO:
https://allaretoreturn.bandcamp.com
https://allaretoreturn.tumblr.com/
https://li.sten.to/AllAreToReturn
https://www.youtube.com/@allaretoreturn

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