Periphery - A Pale White Dot (2026)^{Release ID: 68615}

A Pale White Dot appears to represent either a turning point in the career of the band, or a side project. I echo a lot of the early sentiment surrounding this album when I hope that this is not a sign of things to come for Periphery in the future.

For starters, there isn't that much about A Pale White Dot that really stands out. None of the tracks within have that progressive nature to them; uncommon time signatures, whiplash transitions or extended runtimes. I found myself constantly falling out of sync with this album as it worked its way into the musical background as I work on other things. Songs like "Unlocking" and "Carry On" have decent fundamentals and technically sound great, but they are severely lacking in a truly jaw dropping moment that previous Periphery albums have had in spades.

The album really only has two standout moments. The first is the Will Ramos feature on "Subhuman" with its pedal-to-the-metal, unfiltered aggression. The dual vocals are a nice touch to change up the monotony, while the instrumentals have that unnerving texture, albeit far more subtle than what is to be expected by this band. The other moment is "Blackwall", which drops the guitars altogether in favour of new wave synthesizers. As the song builds up over its duration, one may become anxious in anticipation of the return of the drop tuned guitars and a vicious breakdown... only to find out that there will not be one here. The album does return to form immediately following on "Malevolent", but for these two back-to-back tracks, Periphery really made the best use of time.

The issue is that these two tracks are sandwiched in between ten songs of, relatively speaking, mediocrity. Periphery are still a very talented group, even when they are performing less technical music such as on this album, but the pedigree is far too high. This lack of stylistic variety or technical prowess just leaves A Pale White Dot seemingly empty.

Best Songs: Obsession, Mr. God, Subhuman, Everyone Dies Alone

For Fans Of: ERRA, Invent Animate, TesseracT