OPHÅNIM – OPHÅNIM

HERE’S WHAT WE DUG MOST…

Opening with Prime-Star Creator, we’re immediately treated to a wave of spacey sounds. It’s a slow but captivating build from there, adding layers of melodies and hard-hitting percussion in quick succession until we are in the dark and fast paced apex of the track by the halfway point.

These kinds of layered, complex arrangements are commonplace on the OPHÅNIM album – but never stale. There’s such a variety of textures, rhythms, and melodies that, despite being firmly grounded in a dark EDM production style, each track feels new and entirely its own. Transmission is a testament to that. We find many similar elements on the preceding tracks, but the way the rhythm is presented gives Transmission a primal flare, with its almost Latin-inspired rhythm and intense, howling vocals – a completely different experience than many of the album’s other tracks.

We get a taste of OPHÅNIM’s lyric writing on the industrial and foreboding Fight The Nothing. The lyrics are surprisingly poetic for a genre where word choice is often overlooked, and it gives the track a note of softness and hope from within the driving instrumentation:

“No, we can’t afford to lose
Mind over matter
Doesn’t matter
It will take your soul from you
But we have the strength unseen
Oh dare to bring
Your dreams
Into reality”

We also love Interdimensional Rift for taking us on a dynamic, sonic journey through outer space, and My Hell for defying expectations set by its title and proving a moment of vulnerability and emotion.

OUR FAVORITE TRACK…

Diosa Fortuna no doubt stands on its own as a stand out moment on this album. The crunching, pulsing rhythm section, the wide variety of synths and sounds bringing the primary melodies to life – it’s deeply captivating from a listening standpoint and seems to offer something new to discover on every repeat play. But the music video OPHÅNIM has created to accompany it serves to only heighten the song’s effect. It brings us into a mysterious, perhaps dangerous reality that seems to blur the lines between fantasy and truth. It gives quite a bit of insight into the mind of the band while creating the track, fully immersing the listener into an electro-alternative world.

IN CONCLUSION…

Fans of intense and contemporary electronic music will find a lot to love about OPHÅNIM. This duo is creating bold music with eclectic elements that will have listeners coming back for more time and again, while still staying remarkably well-rounded in their production choices. It’s a captivating balance of texture, rhythm, and melody, and it speaks to the musicality of both band members individually as well as their chemistry together. OPHÅNIM has told us a second album is already in the works, and we look forward to diving into more boundary-pushing, well-composed music from them soon.

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