Whilst your torso and head arrive at the intended location, your four limbs have grimly jettisoned towards other unknown coordinates. Screaming in horrendous agony as you realise that your miscalculation has triggered this fatal teleportation error. Somewhere hidden within the astral realm, the great multicoloured shape shifting baboon deity observes you with a disgusted seething disdain. Accompanying your anguish in this new locale are the discombobulating vibrations of this new album by Costa Rica’s Voidstar Nocturnal. This Progressive Blackened Death Metal trio is a collective of insane musical scientists who bear in their possession a debut album entitled ‘Nexus Teleport Fracture’. The record brings with it an obscuring disarray that is so chaotically imagined that it plunges listeners into the band’s own geometric fourth-dimensional interpretation of a cosmic trippy hell.
Opening this morphing changeling is the instrumental ‘Code Transmutation’ where a spacey Middle Eastern-tinged bass performance sits atop a bed of dark synthwave electronics. It’s an eerie psychedelic introduction into the audible secret science of this record. The song ‘1/137’ plays next. It opens to a multi-layered polyrhythmic dance between dark toned guitars and tribal drums. The growled vocals sit slightly hushed within the mix, adding a layer of mystery to this rift-opening meditation. The track’s central section sees the band switch the tempo into fifth gear, the drums here have a great tangible texture and their clarity within the performance is stunning. I also love the tension that is offered by the elastic range of guitar ideas and how well they coalesce with the percussion. On ‘Saffron Neon’ this exercise in sophisticated tension continues and of particular excellence, here is the nimble bass performance by band member Kevin Moran. The instrumental track ‘Holographic Neural Pathways’ opens to more electronic instrumentation with a Trance music inspired synth warble. A droning guitar accompanied by scattered cymbal taps permeates the scene as the electronics die in volume. The band awakens after this introduction and I love the Jazz fusion swing and brisk chasing tempo of the drums.
Track seven ‘Black Gold Ecstasy & Lumen Deformans’ begins with an immense tribalistic solo drum performance. This intriguing contribution feels like suitable mystical fanfare for a dark magic clandestine ritual taking place within a large temple courtyard… in space. The drums are later accompanied by a gliding melodic bass pattern that merges somewhat harmoniously with the percussion. The album’s closer and ultimate course arrives in the form of the fourteen minute mighty beast ‘The Tower Part I & II’. The track’s opening two minutes feature a doomy and ever so slightly Blues-tinged guitar riff and I love the Jazz Fusion tonality of the bass during this section. Later on, the song moves through a lucid floating phase of dark psychedelia, which is one moment in particular that attests to Voidstar Nocturnal’s biggest strength as a band; their spectacular approach to atmosphere. After this gravity-less section a loud simple guitar motif is played out with a fierce repetition, as the track progresses, the full band manages to latch onto this motif and it almost feels as if the band are spiraling with a disorientating gravitational force. It is an incredible section, and, dare I say, bordering on genius. This superbly executed transition then allows the heavy chaotic strands of the band’s core sound to re-emerge for the song’s final third. In this last section, Voidstar sounds more demonicly malevolent than at any point on the album. The band again toys with electronics and they eventually fade out in a converging percussive storm. All in all, this grand finale is one of the most well considered compositions that I’ve heard all year.
Nexus Teleport Fracture scratches a musical itch for me that I didn’t know I even had. It’s an outlier for me amongst the great albums released so far in 2026. The band’s fusion of Progressive Extreme Metal, Electronic Music and Jazz Fusion is an intelligently realised musical vision. It takes a lot of real quality for me to be wowed by highly progressive and indulgent extreme Metal, and Voidstar Nocturnal has done just that. This is a record that is awash in magnificent production, skilful instrumental performances and clever, attention seizing writing. Repeated exposure to this LP will only serve to pull you further into the portal of Voidstar’s morphing celestial creation. Just as well, then, that it’s a realm I can’t stop getting helplessly lost within.
