SYMBIOTIC GROWTH: “BEYOND THE SLEEPLESS AETHER”

(Everyone here only writes about music they want to recommend, but as you’ll see from DGR‘s following review of Symbiotic Growth‘s new album, he is especially enthusiastic about what they’ve accomplished.)

As 2025 has wandered onward we’ve been afforded a few chances to dig backward through the pile of music that we missed. The compulsion to try and cover everything that you’ve been enjoying can sometimes be just as strong as the urge to constantly be at the forefront of the most recent music to hit. The battle of the two can sometimes turn ugly and the cuts made can be just as brutal as the music you’re listening to.

But sometimes you find stuff that’s so special you just can’t let it go, and the world be damned, you will make time to discuss it in one form or another. Thus, when we do get these chances to bring up releases that we’d been meaning to talk about for a while, we’re going to take it. And that brings us to Symbiotic Growth, a progressive black and death metal band hailing from Ontario, Canada. They share members with a few other projects we’ve written about, including the oppressively dense death metal act Fractal Generator, whom drummer Dan Favot has belonged to.

2025 has so far  wobbled musically on a lot of fronts. There haven’t been as many new and grand surprises so far, but plenty of groups have been putting out damned strong efforts – even those who’re in the double digits when it comes to album counts. Symbiotic Growth‘s second album Beyond The Sleepless Aether is of a different class though, because this is an album that has been a pleasant surprise since we came across it but also a disc that will reveal itself to be something truly special… especially if you’re a fan of An Abstract Illusion‘s album Woe

Beyond The Sleepless Aether is a concept album consisting of remarkably intricate songs, all tied together so as to resemble one massive piece. Its seven songs weigh in at well over an hour’s worth of music for an adventure described by Symbiotic Growth as:

A man journeys through all of his alternate reality’s, trying to find some kind of meaning to life, dreaming for a reason to live, are the answers in front of him or are they through the hangman’s noose.

The album follows him on his journey to all these places, finding himself floating within the cosmos, laying down in tall grass before an abandoned church, braving land locked deserts, contemplating his life

This affords Symbiotic Growth quite a bit of artistic room to move around in and the three-piece take advantage of it, crafting seven tales that weave in and out of each other with both soaring and crashing dramaticism well in play. Symbiotic Growth use the lengthy run times of their compositions to reach far and wide musically, resulting in an ambitious album that has honestly been very hard to remove from the space it took over in the brain after the first few listens. When an album like this more often than not leaves you entranced enough that you don’t notice the passage of time until a movie sample opens up the next song, then you know you’ve come across something great.

Beyond The Sleepless Aether has a vested interest in how it builds to each song’s particular high points. A song may at first seem like an immersive exercise in long-form songwriting – in all seriousness the range of songs here is between seven and ten and a half minutes – as it reaches the highs of an almost transcendent take on black metal to all of sudden mutate into a keyboard-driven midpoint and a progressive death metal groove.

There’s arguments to be made for both placing limitations on a group and also letting a band try to use as much as they can, and Symbiotic Growth are of the latter class. Symbiotic Growth have a lot of elements appearing within each song on their second album that will place the band far beyond the descriptor of being just a “progressive black metal” group. By the end of Beyond The Sleepless Aether the list of descriptors and sub-genres in play is vast enough to appear comedic. With the reins taken off of them, Symbiotic Growth get to work immediately in creating something truly magnetic.

For all the tales, trials, and travails that could be described though, there could actually be none so great as the initial charge of trying to make it to this album’s fourth song without running back through the first three a handful more times. The joy of discovery and just how much Symbiotic Growth have layered into each song is enough to keep someone going for a while. They don’t break out any tremendously strange instrumentation on the first handful of songs for their protagonist’s alternate realities, but they do stuff these songs with so many fascinating parts and segments that you’re drawn in just to see what’s next, or in the case of “The Architect Of Annihilation” just how long the band will maintain that opening clean vocals and blast beat section.

The first half of that song alone is enough to make Beyond The Sleepless Aether seem worth it. It is certainly one of the highlight songs of the initial music arc of the album for sure. As the album’s first ten-minute epic, it takes the soaring ambitions of opener “Of Painted Skies And Dancing Lights” and combines it well with the more aggressive overtones of “Spires Of The Boundless Sunset”. It doesn’t quite put as neat a bow as you would expect on a standard three-act arc but it gains enough for its own quest that the ten minutes blurring by makes it seem that the fourth song “The Sleepless Void” arrives all too soon.

“Arid Trials and Barren Sands” opens with a destructively abrasive opening segment that doesn’t fully lighten up for an actual verse until the two-minute mark, meaning that for a good third of the song you’re listening to a surprisingly hefty sludge groove with enough murk layered over it to appear death metal. The song does eventually wade back into the waters of something resembling a progressive black metal tag, but that feels almost like a footnote after four other songs of densely packed material.

At this point in Beyond The Sleepless Aether it’s likely you’re already taking a wider worldview of this release and seeing it in more in panorama than one single-minded shot and song-for-song take. “Arid Trials And Barren Sands” starts chaotic and ends chaotic, giving up space for one of the few truly “quiet” moments of Beyond The Sleepless Aether, which only happens in the opening of “Lost In Fractured Reveries”. That song eventually does get as heavy as its cohorts but does also find itself somewhat overshadowed by the ten-minute epic of “Trading Thoughts For Sleep” as the closing act. Not to say there isn’t one massive and well-executed guitar slide just when the song ascends to peak heaviness for the first time. We’d be remisss without giving that thing some sort of call out.

“Trading Thoughts For Sleep” is a great act of finality to close out Beyond The Sleepless Aether. Partially a summation of the album as a whole, yet also something that could stand strongly on its own. Symbiotic Growth are a bit more even-keeled in their composition on that front and by the time you’ve reached “Trading Thoughts For Sleep” most of the elements that will be making up the tightly packed and tightly wound song are pieces that you could pick out from elsewhere in this album. Beyond The Sleepless Aether is not an extended tutorial in that way, but it does set itself up to have an excellent closing chapter, for which “Trading Thoughts For Sleep” is more than able to answer the call.

Beyond The Sleepless Aether plays with a lot of known elements and turns them into something unknown. That you can take so many recognizable pieces and transform them into something truly all your own is an incredible work. Symbiotic Growth have tackled a rare challenge to make an hour-plus worth of music and make it seem as if it is one continuous tale, resulting in something truly intricate and immense. These are big songs that could be treated as separate journeys, but if there’s a chance to take Beyond The Sleepless Aether as one go, the full, finite experience is one that should not be passed up.

Don’t let Symbiotic Growth‘s second album fly under your radar; Beyond The Sleepless Aether is a release well worth all the time it asks from listeners.

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