Progressive Rock
Tonzonen Records · 18 September 2026
The opening title track starts with Didi Holzner’s organ, and Holzner is a guest. For the first stretch of its near-ten minutes, the instrument laying down the harmonic ground doesn’t belong to the band: Matthias Wettstein’s guitar comes in by layers, while Ekhard Kazmaier and Marcus Schnitzler hold a pulse that keeps rising and never quite breaks.
Four tracks, forty-four minutes. “Survive To Win” (11:36) is the most head-on of them, built on an insistent riff and a long guitar solo with Mediterranean modal leanings. “Whales” (14:49) is the longest, and the one that allows itself the most time going nowhere, until a wah-driven swell resolves it. “On The Verge Of Delirium” (7:49) closes in the tightest form of the four: saturation, synth, tambourine and an ending that never quite settles.
This is the band’s ninth studio album and their eighth for Tonzonen, the label they have worked with since “Synapse” (April 2014). The Spacelords started in Reutlingen in April 2008 as a quartet with flute and have been a trio since late 2009. Schnitzler came up through Electric Moon, and the mastering is signed by Eroc, the Grobschnitt drummer turned engineer.
“Nectar of the Gods” (2023) was also four tracks, laid out across almost exactly the same spread of minutes, and the thing that changes the colour here — Holzner’s organ — comes from outside the band. What the three of them are doing differently from three years ago is hard to put a finger on. There’s a second problem: the label presents “Survive To Win” as the album’s conceptual centre, and on a record with no voice that idea only reaches whoever has read the press release.
The title track came out as a single with a video on 31 July.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Guillem Cardós