Nowhere Speaks by Emptiness is hard to put your finger on. I mean, the band is called Emptiness after all, and you can’t exactly put your finger on nothingness. It’s tough to say whether the album is a noise ambient album or a proper metal album. It’s heavy as the weight of nothingness. Admittedly, that can make it sound not heavy at all, but if you consider the weight of song titles like “Nowhere Speaks,” “All for Nothing,” and “Words to Wind,” it starts to paint a picture of uncertainty and meaning, or lack of. It’s the idea that there’s nothing out there, and it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter.

With vocals that lay sometimes between a whisper and other times a death-like growl, it makes the album mysterious and tough to connect to on an emotional level. The drums are often disorientating, yet also manage to keep a consistent pulse. The guitar is vague enough that it can be hard to tell what exactly is happening, but it still manages to create an environment of unsteady nightmares.

My favourite track is “The Threat.” It has a cool repeated four-note groove that I really liked. But in my opinion, it was the only track to really give you much as a listener. The rest of the album kind of fell under a noise and textures branch, which didn’t do a lot for me personally.

I didn’t realize this upon my first couple listens until reading the bio, but the opening track “Nothing But the Whole” is actually a second part to their 2014 release Nothing But the Whole. I found it interesting that they were still continuing on material that was released 12 years ago. It’s also inspired me to go back and listen to more of their back catalog.

As the feedback fades, Nowhere Speaks is a background-noise, dissonant album that paints a bleak landscape in an ambient metal genre. Emptiness has definitely done things the way they want to do it, which has created an interesting album in the dissonant art metal genre.