Written By Chris Norris
The Konsent doesn’t arrive screaming about oppression. It does something more uncomfortable. It asks how much of our captivity we quietly agree to.
The machine isn’t simply crushing humanity. It appears to be cultivating it.
There are albums you admire, albums you respect, and albums that hit the nervous system before the brain has had time to explain why. The Konsent belongs in the third category.
“Metal Lair recently spoke with Ales Campanelli about the concept, construction and philosophy behind The Konsent, and that conversation adds another layer to an album already packed with them.”
Within the opening moments of K-1 in this The Konsent album review, the first thing worth addressing is the physical reaction the record produces.
Before its larger concept comes into focus something happens that is difficult to fake and even harder to manufacture on command: frisson. Goosebumps. That sudden little electrical rush that travels across the skin when music lands exactly where it is supposed to.
It happened on the first listen. Then it happened again. And that is where The Konsent begins its work.
Built without guitar and conceived as one continuous piece, the album creates its weight through bass, drums, keyboards and Steve Fari’s remarkably elastic vocals.
It is futuristic without sounding sterile, progressive without disappearing into self-indulgence, and heavy without relying on the usual machinery of metal.
Across the record, Ales Campanelli’s bass remains unusually present, sometimes carrying the sheer physical force that a guitar would normally provide, while the keyboards reach backward into the experimental language of the 1970s and forward into something dystopian, mechanical and deeply strange.
The result is an album that feels less like a collection of songs than a transmission. And the more you listen, the more addictive it becomes.
This record doesn’t give everything up immediately. It keeps revealing texture the deeper you get.
The Konsent Album Review Track Breakdown
The track-by-track portion of The Konsent album review reveals just how carefully the record develops its dystopian world, with each movement adding another layer to the larger transmission.
K-1
K-1 opens somewhere between an abandoned industrial complex and the interior of a spacecraft. A brief wash of mechanical ambience establishes the world before the bass arrives with real physical weight.
The keyboards immediately introduce one of the record’s defining contradictions: they carry the unmistakable DNA of 1970s progressive rock while everything around them feels modern, alien and unsettling.
Steve Fari’s vocal performance becomes another instrument in that tension. At times his voice takes on an almost machine-generated quality, processed and strangely inhuman; elsewhere it becomes velvety, melodic and remarkably warm.
The contrast is palpable. Throughout The Konsent, humanity and machinery seem to be staring at one another through the same piece of glass.
K-1 is the track that hit me hardest on first listen. This is where the goosebumps started, and repeated plays have not dulled them.
The irony is almost perverse. K-1 repeatedly describes a population being kept numb while the music itself produces the opposite physical response. This was the track that gave me goosebumps. Whatever sedation exists inside the lyrics, the composition refuses to participate.
K-2
K-2 continues the journey rather than resetting it. Its opening briefly carries a Sleep Token-like sense of space and restraint before distortion begins to corrode the edges. Then the song mutates again.
The closest description I can manage is Logan’s Run meets Breaking Benjamin wearing the future.
There are flashes of Yes in the keyboards, but the familiarity never lasts long enough to become comfortable. The song is simultaneously poignant and uneasy. K-2 feels like a warning about a society that no longer needs to be conquered because it has learned to police itself.
And this is where The Konsent begins to reveal one of its more dangerous qualities: the more you listen, the more addictive it becomes. Another detail emerges. Another texture catches the ear. Another pass suddenly seems necessary.
You don’t finish with it. You need another hit.
K-3
K-3 sounds like Emerson, Lake & Palmer meets Star Trek, but underneath the prog futurism is something much less playful. Its references to sickness, “Soma,” artificial realms and becoming “less awake” suggest another form of surrender: if reality becomes intolerable, escape from it instead.
The progressive elements are especially pronounced here, but the song never becomes nostalgic. The bass gives the whole thing grit and mass while the keyboards move through far stranger territory. There is real beauty in the composition, but it is beauty with machinery humming beneath it.
K-4A
K-4A is eerie but gorgeous, and the lyrics refuse to make that beauty safe. Ideas of belonging, exclusion, conformity and independent action run through the track until even paradise becomes something capable of destroying the mind.
The tempo builds slowly rather than lunging forward, with ambient percussion allowing the atmosphere to breathe.
This may be the most cryptic lyric on the album:
“Leading them to cast me out”
“‘Cause you leave me out”
and later:
“Could you strike a man / Can you act on your own”
There’s clearly tension between the collective and the individual, belonging and exclusion, acting independently versus moving with the group.
And:
“Then paradise destroys the mind”
There is something here that reminds me of SQÜRL’s “Spooky Action at a Distance,” not because the pieces sound identical, but because they create a similar sensation of drifting through an environment that feels beautiful, vast and faintly threatening.
K-4B
K-4B removes the human voice entirely.
The instrumental feels like stepping inside the Matrix while some enormous system wakes up around you. The arrangement grows increasingly cinematic until the closing movement feels almost like a launch sequence: machinery accelerating, systems engaging, the ship leaving the ground.
Placed where it is, the instrumental does not feel like an interlude. It feels like transition.
By this point, The Konsent album review has moved beyond atmosphere and concept into consequence, as the record’s ideas about control, complicity and surrender begin to harden into something far more direct.
K-5
Sonically K-5 feels like the integration of man and machine has finally stopped being theoretical.
Lyrically, however, the target is brutally human: wealth gathered above the starving, silence mistaken for innocence, and denial used as shelter from complicity.
“Like a wake of hungry vultures / Gathering the wealth”
“While the starving reach the gates”
“Let your silence be your voice”
“None should be allowed to absolve himself / But denial feels so safe”
It is intrusive, heavy and consequential, easily the most immediately headbangable passage on the album to this point. Bass, keys, drums and vocals stop behaving like separate components and begin moving as a single organism, a symphony about destruction.
Yeah. I know exactly what I did there. And I love this song.
There is real force here, but also remarkable beauty. By its closing moments, the keyboards have transformed the track into something profoundly dystopian, almost alien.
The ending feels deliberate enough to be disturbing, as though whatever process the album has been describing has now passed the point of reversal.
It’s fucking beautiful. I’m in love with this album.
K-6
By K-6, the warning has become consequence. Control is no longer implied; it announces itself. Greed and envy have been crowned, rebellion is being crushed, and the ground is collapsing beneath everyone. Yet buried inside the ruin is one last command to rise.
Distorted keyboards and vocals create an atmosphere that is mournful before the song eventually becomes crushingly heavy. By this point the album no longer feels like a warning about what might happen. The warning has already been ignored.
Now come the consequences. There is sadness in it, but not innocence. The feeling is closer to: you brought this upon yourself, and now you have to live inside what you created.
The album closes as an extraordinarily cohesive musical ensemble, but more importantly, its signal has been received. At least by this reviewer.
The Konsent sounds futuristic, but what it is warning about is painfully contemporary.
The great trick of The Konsent is that it sounds like a transmission from a dystopian future until you read the lyrics and realize the transmission is coming from the present.
The Konsent is one of those rare albums that gets stranger, heavier, richer and more addictive the deeper you go. It challenged me, unsettled me, gave me goosebumps and made me want to start it over the second it ended.
Writing The Konsent album review means trying to describe an album that keeps changing shape the longer you sit with it. Its progressive, industrial and cinematic elements continue revealing themselves long after the first listen, making the record feel less like something you simply hear and more like something you gradually decode.
“Sybreed fans may recognize a familiar industrial pulse in the production and thematic tension, but The Konsent never feels derivative; it bends that DNA into something stranger, more progressive and entirely its own.”
“Only two albums in Metal Lair’s review history have received a perfect five out of five Metal Horns. The Konsent is one of them.”
Metal Lair Awards The Konsent 5/5 Metal Horns
THE KONSENT — TRACKLIST
SIDE A
K01
K02
K03
SIDE B
K04
K05
K06
Lineup:
Ales: bass and keys
Abstraum: visuals and keys
Steve Fari: vocals
Mathieu Martinazzo: drums
THE KONSENT — JAPAN TOUR 2026
December 4 — LIVE FREAK, Shinjuku December 5 — SUNRISE, Ryogoku December
6 — SILVER ELEPHANT, Kichijoji December 8 — Yogibo HOLY MOUNTAIN, Osaka
December 9 — GATTACA, Kyoto December 12 — BABEL, Tachikawa December 13 —
SOUGEN, Shizuoka
THE KONSENT ONLINE:
About the Author
Chris Norris is the voice behind Metal Lair’s global metal coverage, World Metal Weekly. From funeral doom in the north to thrash born in the streets. Known for spotlighting bands before algorithms notice them and for writing with the precision of a scalpel… or a well-sharpened guitar pick. Vinyl collector. Night-shift journalist. Believes heavy music has no borders.
Read More From This Author:
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Stoned Jesus Songs to Moon Interview: Igor Sydorenko on Darkness, Descent and the Trilogy
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