Mount Palatine – Wormholy World

 

 

Mount Palatine – Wormholy World
Octopus Rising / Argonauta Records – 2026
Metal, Doom, Psych, Prog, Sludge 
Rated: ****

A crusading force rises out of the wasteland like a sworn knight emerging from a blinding sandstorm. The dust cloud is dense, thick but through it you can see the outlines of a band called Mount Palatine emerging with an album called Wormholy World, here to stabilize the particles into one focused sphere. Once traversing that globe under the name The Paladin, the new name feels like a much better fit. For this heavy psychedelic doom sounds mountainous, concentrated yet hallucinatory and very strangely philosophical. As if they survived an apocalyptic event and learnt what’s truly important… 

Seismic riffs and molten grooves, colliding with melodic after shocks as the horizon cracks and breaks. There’s a new sense of confidence here, as the band leans into longer forms, deeper atmospheres and a definite willingness to let things breathe and exhale before finally detonating. And even though there is still ground to gain when it comes to the vocals, the scorched-earth rasp has its moments and sometimes even seems to ground all the chaos with human pain and grit. 

But as the record  unfolds, meditative passages blur and weave into sludgy gravity wells. And as those fragments float in and out of focus, songs almost seem to rebuild themselves mid-collapse. Nothing stays still for very long. Themes, eastern or abstract, yet always intimate and enticing. Luring you deeper into their world. A Wormholy World that feels like a half-remembered future or past, from a gone away world. A time where meaning still matters or mattered or will once have mattered.

And as you traverse their landscape, you hold on as the final stretch, embraces its cinematic scope with even more feverous energy and daring. Ever heavier, searing and stranger, with grooves that hit like collapsing structures and melodies that refuse to die down. They return over and over. Just like Mount Palatine themselves. For, Mount Palatine stand not as resurrected ghosts, but as warriors who have laid their former selves to rest. Having buried The Paladin, they rise without hesitation, declaring their true form, victorious among the fallen, unashamed, and crowned not by ego, but by conviction. Wormholy World is here to make you swim with the wind and peek behind the curtain… 

And we are honored to host the FULL ALBUM PREMIERE for Wormholy World on February 5th ! So check out the first two Mount Palatine singles today and return to Stoner HiVe on February 5th for the FULL ALBUM PREMIERE!  

(Written by JK)

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