Dvne - "Voidkind"

Heavy, epic, and monstrously good

Dvne (pronounced “Dune”; the band takes its name from Frank Herbert’s Dune) is one of those bands who have become very well-known in certain circles. They aren’t yet big enough to have a Wikipedia page, but if you mention them to anybody deep in the Prog/Sludge Metal sphere, you’re very likely going to see their eyes light up and get a “you listen to Dvne?!” response. This is why I do not know how this album dropped in April and I completely missed it.

Regardless, this sort of wildly positive but purely underground, word-of-mouth reputation is an entirely deserved and organic structure. There’s nothing superficial about Dvne; their whole approach is epic sci-fi storytelling set to epic instrumentation. And their sound is fairly unique to them — Progressive Metal technicality meets Sludge Metal density meets Post-Metal atmospherics. The closest comparison, in my head, is Elder — and that’s possibly because I discovered them at the same time and they’re both Prog bands that tend to create these epic-length tracks as a bare minimum.

Dvne formed in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2013. “Displaced Frenchman” Victor Vicart met Scotsman Dudley Tait, and Dvne followed shortly thereafter, with EPs released in 2013 & 2014. Their first LP, Asheran, came in 2017, and it was followed up with Etemen Aenka in 2021.¹ Each album tells a self-contained story, and these stories all exist within the same universe. The first two albums both revolved around the same planet, but Voidkind takes us elsewhere.

Voidkind is also another huge step forward for the band. Most notably, the clarity of the mix is impressive. Sludge is very much defined by how the various elements present in the mix sort of bleed together, so to still sound sludgy, yet also have absolute clarity on what each instrument is contributing, is a masterclass in proper mixing. The band did an AMA on Reddit, and one of the top questions asked specifically about this:

Q: (courtesy of u/TylerJohnsonDaGOAT)

“Voidkind finally "clicked" for me and now I can't stop playing it. I saw someone saying that the goal for Voidkind's sound was basically to be clearer, like each guitar on one side, and overall easier to reproduce live. It sounds fantastic. But, I want to ask about Etemen. Back when you were making that album, how did you accomplish THAT sound? It was a big step forward from Asheran.”

A: (from what I presume is the band’s collective account, u/dvne-1989)²

I think Etemen was a step up because we got better at playing our instruments and our producers also got better at recording. But I don't remember us being as clear as we were in term of how we wanted things to sound like. We approached Etemen a bit more freely in terms of layering too especially. There are so many layers on that album, which is great, but also makes things a bit cluttered when mixing. So we wanted to avoid this with Voidkind and make it feel closer to what the live version would be.

Whatever actual changes in approach this new philosophy brought, this is the best Dvne have ever sounded.

Voidkind is a ride, start-to-finish. There are no specifically up- or down-beat songs because each song is just a greater part of the whole (this is a Prog band, don’t forget), and the shifts in tone or tempo are just as likely to happen mid-track as between them. Especially when only three of the album’s ten tracks are shorter than five minutes. Two of them, “Path of Dust” and “Path of Ether”, are just minute-and-a-half transitional tracks which frame the album’s halfway point, with track 6, “Sarmatae”, falling between them. “Sarmatae” is the third and final sub-five minute song at 4:30. The two “Path of” tracks are the album’s lightest points, though.

Dvne does use harsh vocals in nearly every track, but these are blended with the instrumentation to a point where I actually enjoy them, and they occasionally switch out with clean vox.

There’s still a lot more to analyze and break down here. I could spend probably triple my current wordcount on this album — exactly the same issue I had with Kendrick’s GNX. If I start diving further in, I might never make it out, and I have a lot more to get through.

Suffice it to say that Voidkind blends melodicism, technical instrumentation, and epic storytelling to create a package which is both face-meltingly heavy and musically compelling. This is one of the best metal albums of the year. Hands-down.

Rating: Purple

1. I did review Etemen Aenka in 2021. It rated a Blue and ranked 29th for the year.

2. Going by this username, I think we can confirm that Dvne are Swifties.