LUNATIC SOUL - The World Under Unsun

In nearly two decades of career, Mariusz Duda has built a corpus that seems to exist across three complementary dimensions: the public persona of Riverside, where progressive rock intertwines with heavy streaks and a taste for climax; the private, ritualistic persona of Lunatic Soul, made of inner breath, transfigured folk and progressive undertones; and finally the tonal laboratory of his electronic solo work, a hall of mirrors where sound manipulation can be explored without answering to any orthodoxy. Duda admits it with clarity: part of the prog audience calls for innovation, yet wants it within reassuring boundaries, with mandatory instruments and roles. Lunatic Soul was also born to escape those liturgies: not the project of "the Riverside bassist", but of the composer, free to shed his skin and grammar with every new chapter.

Five years have passed since the last chapter of the project, a stretch of time marked by losses, rebirths, electronic detours and a deep rethinking of his own emotional geography. "The World Under Unsun" thus arrives at a natural and delicate moment: it is openly the closing act of the life-death-rebirth cycle that has sustained Lunatic Soul from the start, yet at the same time a work called upon to renegotiate its own face in light of what Duda has become.

The title itself makes the intent clear. Duda explains that he always imagined Lunatic Soul as a cycle in colours: for the closing chapter he wanted yellow, the desert, sand, full light. And yet, since Lunatic Soul is nocturnal music, the sun can only flip into its opposite: hence the Unsun, a sun denied, eclipsed, a glow that exists more as absence than presence. Not an image that illuminates, but an idea that makes the shadow easier to read.

The closing chapter also chooses a countercurrent form: over ninety minutes, a double album that in the streaming era sounds almost like a statement of intent. Duda champions listening as ritual: not fragments, not playlists, but a single body to move through unhurriedly. It's not mere excess: it's a defence of the album as therapeutic space, a long stretch of time in which emotions can settle. Stylistically, the album confirms Lunatic Soul's hybrid vocation: folk roots and progressive sensibility filtered through ambient and electronics, rarefied textures and measured orchestral touches that expand the emotional intensity without overwhelming it.

There's also an element that clarifies, more than any definition could, what Lunatic Soul has become: the music doesn't grow out of solos, but out of sound design. What matters here is repetition, trance, the progressive layering of levels. It's an almost electronic logic, where the intro doesn't build toward an event but coincides with the event itself. Traditional solos are few, by choice; in their place is sound design, the art of letting a landscape grow and breathe. That's also why the length works: because the album operates through emotional accumulation, not plot twists.

While remaining a deeply personal project (Duda writes the music and lyrics and plays most of the instruments), the record welcomes a few targeted contributions that broaden its emotional range: the essential, expressive drumming of Wawrzyniec Dramowicz, the saxophone of Marcin Odyniec — able to slip into the subtlest textures — and the sonic touches of Mateusz Owczarek. Discreet interventions, never overstated, but essential in giving the record that "breathed" dimension that defines its final character.

The opening title track immediately introduces this balance: acoustic half-light and faint electronics, an entrance without emphasis, almost a threshold slowly swinging open. "Loop Of Fate" naturally extends that breath: pulsing bass, synths in micro-oscillations, vocals entering almost at the margins. "The Prophecy" briefly lights up the scene with a filtered glow: a distant echo of Riverside, more a flicker than an explicit callback, immediately reined in by an arrangement that forgoes progressive drive in favour of suspension.

The album's true emotional depth arrives when it slows down. "Mind Obscured, Heart Eclipsed" settles like fog: eleven minutes that seek not a peak but an underlying tension made of fades and controlled density, with the sax entering like a crack of air. "Monsters" reveals its most unsettling face: it grows like a silent threat, carried by timbres that seem to emerge from a shadow zone. "Hands Made Of Lead" pushes that darkness onto an even more interior plane: drones and sonic currents carve out deep spaces without indulgence, while the voice remains a timbre among timbres, a compass rather than a pose.

The suite “Game Called Life” grants an emotional truce: acoustic guitars, melodic openings, an almost Tangerine Dream-like hypnosis by addition. “Self In Distorted Glass” then warps this balance: liquid ambient and electronics, fragmented vocals, a structure like a hall of mirrors. The closing seal is “The New End”, piano and subtraction, a final breath more than a signature; “Good Memories Don't Want to Die” is its luminous counter-shot, awash in strings and ukulele, like another perspective on the same feeling.

“The World Under Unsun” finds its strength in the maturity with which Duda unites the various souls of his own path: not a celebratory compendium, but a natural closing chapter. Solid and coherent, it reaches a surprisingly natural balance between intimacy and timbral exploration; a few slack moments don't dent a whole sustained by the quality of the songwriting. And if this really were the final chapter, it would also be the one most faithful to the project's spirit: a discreet pulse that keeps vibrating after the silence, leaving a possibility half-open – to return, one day, only by breaking some taboo, perhaps even that of the electric guitar avoided so far as an identity choice.

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11/01/2026