Or: Cosmic Devastation with a Human Pulse
Let’s be honest.
I don’t do space. Never have. Probably never will.
Black holes? Nebulas? Celestial metaphors for inner turmoil?
No thanks. Keep your stars. Keep your orbits.
I don’t care what’s out there. I’m barely holding it together down here.
The whole fascination with cosmic horror, stellar collapse, the unknowable void—I don’t get it.
I’ve never gotten it. I don’t even want to get it.
If I wake up one day and someone’s finally explained the universe to me, I will simply walk into the sea.
So yes—thematically, this is really, truly, absolutely not my thing.
I wouldn’t have picked this one up. I wouldn’t have made it past the tracklist.
But it was handed to me. And the person who did that trusted me enough to find the right words, to look underneath the surface, and maybe—hopefully—to hear what was actually there.
Let’s peel back some layers.
Because there are some.
So. This Landed in My Inbox.
Black Negative Domination (do I smell some Type O reverie here?).
Stellar Collapse.
Four tracks. Thirty-three minutes.
Blackened death metal, sharpened at the edges, occasionally softened by something suspiciously close to actual feeling. The entire thing comes from one hand—Stefan Lang—with a guest solo on track two courtesy of Haui from Silius. That’s it. That’s the crew.
Only four tracks, but don’t be fooled. The title track pushes eleven minutes and stretches its limbs while it’s at it. No interludes, no filler. Just a slow, deliberate spiral through grief, rage, and cosmic annihilation.
Or something like that.
There's a Pattern Here
It doesn’t start slow.
The first track (Oblivion Codex) kicks the hatch open and boots you straight into vacuum. No build-up. No cosmic foreplay. Just one scale—and boom. Machine-gun drums, frantic riffing, and a growl like someone gargling gravel in a blender.
It’s the most straightforward track on here. Tight. Aggressive. No time to think, barely time to blink. It does slow down once—halfway through—lets a riff slither out and gives the vocals room to smoulder.
For a moment I thought, Oh. Something’s creeping.
And then we’re right back to being bludgeoned. Naturally.
Also: the vocals? Recognised them immediately. I know Stefan from another of his projects—and yes, still sounding like bottled menace. Man’s got a brand, and he sticks to it.
But then—
Then Creators of Flesh opens with a gentle little guitar line that almost dares you to relax.
You know it won’t last. Of course it doesn’t. But it sets a tone—one that keeps threading through the rest of the album.
This isn’t all violence. It could be. But it’s not. There’s something more interesting going on.
Even in the thick of the blast beats, there's this ghost of restraint. A soft spot. A bassline you can feel in your bones. A solo that wavers on the edge of classic heavy metal nostalgia, then veers off just before it gets sentimental. Clean vocals drift in for a second—not polished, not perfect, but present. Human.
And then it shifts again.
The title track—Stellar Collapse—is the one that made me stop fidgeting. It gives you space. It opens wide. There’s a full two, almost three minutes of atmosphere before the metal kicks back in, and it’s beautiful. Earnest, even. I don’t know if it’s meant to be tender, but it is.
There’s a section in the middle that lets the guitars wander, lets the drums take a step back, and suddenly the track feels like it’s breathing—expanding and collapsing, like lungs in a vacuum.
It’s probably the most emotional moment on the record—at least for me. And when the heaviness returns, it feels earned.
And then there’s X-8890: Black Star Protocol.
It’s the closer. It’s the emotional one. You don’t even have to read the lyrics to feel it—though if you do, you’ll see it’s not about stars at all. Not really.
It’s about orbiting someone you were never meant to. About being pulled toward someone who’ll never let you land.
Heartbreak in a black hole metaphor. Fine. I’ll allow it.
There’s silence in the middle. Actual, full-stop-silence.
It’s not dramatic—it’s just still. And when the instruments come back, it doesn’t feel like a drop—it feels like drift. Like aftermath.
Stars? Still don't care. But this one got a signal through.
In the end, Stellar Collapse isn’t really about collapsing stars. Or ancient bargains gone wrong. Or celestial punishments. Or civilisations crumbling under their own hubris. There is all your standard apocalypse fare dressed in stardust—yes. But really, underneath—I think it’s about the things we launch into space because we don’t know what else to do with them.
Grief. Heartbreak. The quiet, steady hum of rage that doesn’t go anywhere because it has nowhere left to go. Underneath the cosmic metaphors—it's painfully human. And maybe that’s the point.
It floats.
It doesn’t resolve.
It just drifts—heavy, glowing, unfinished.
Some things are like that.
I won’t pretend this made me a believer in cosmic collapse. Or celestial metaphors. Or whatever else people keep projecting onto the sky.
I still don’t care what’s out there.
I’m not gazing into the void. I’m side-eyeing it.
But for thirty-three minutes, this one managed to hold me in orbit.
Which—considering the theme—is annoyingly appropriate.
Give it a listen. If nothing else, it’s a decent place to drift.