Progressive RockPost-rock
Aether Music · 22 May 2026
“Swerve” runs past ten minutes and closes the album with the keyboards out front. It is the only piece on “III” that gives itself time to develop, and the one that best explains what AetheR want to be: an instrumental group that builds in layers, with Andrea Ferrari’s guitar and keyboards holding the structure and Andrea Grumelli’s fretless bass moving underneath it.
The other five each go their own way. “Oort Cloud” opens as an atmospheric ballad and ends up a rock piece run by the keyboards. “Vogon” is the only one with a vocal, by Claudio Milano, and carries guitar solos. “Cinq Teintes, Quatre Cadres” shifts metre and heads into space rock. “La Mélancolie Du Petit Prince” is a short piano piece with electronic detail. And “Panta Rei” puts piano, bass, guitar and flute to work together, which is where the quartet sounds most like a band and least like a sum of parts.
The third album arrives with a line-up that overlaps with I Sincopatici’s: Grumelli plays fretless bass here and in I Sincopatici, and Claudio Milano, who sings on “Vogon”, had sung on that group’s first record. AetheR’s own colour comes from Andrea Serino’s Fender Rhodes, which turns up everywhere and pulls the quieter passages off acoustic-piano ground. Matteo Ravelli handles drums and electronics.
Six tracks in six different registers do not make an album, they make a sampler. “Vogon”, the one with a voice, sits isolated inside an instrumental programme; “La Mélancolie Du Petit Prince” ends before it gets anywhere; and between the opener and “Swerve” there is no thread tying the forty-odd minutes together. When the group concentrates (on “Panta Rei”, on the final stretch of “Swerve”) the level jumps, and that is when you notice what has been left behind.
It came out on 22 May 2026. It is the group’s third album; the Progressive Rock Central review credits it to Aether Music, while the iTunes listing attributes it to Luminol Records.
Rating: 6.8/10
Text by Guillem Cardós