Venera’s Exinfinite is not merely an album to be played—it is an experience to be inhabited. It unfolds slowly, deliberately, like a machine booting in the dead of night, its circuits humming with ghostly echoes of human despair. Across nine meticulously crafted tracks, the duo constructs a soundscape that feels simultaneously ancient and futuristic, as if the collapse of a medieval cathedral were being broadcast through a cyberpunk mainframe. The result is music that doesn’t just evoke dread—it embeds it physically, vibrating in the bones and lingering in the air like charged static.
From the opening track Tear, the listener is drawn into this eerie, mechanized world. Synths wail like sirens, basslines drag you into subterranean depths, and percussion snaps with the tension of a world perpetually on edge. On Flatline, the tempo rises, yet the pulse feels less like a heartbeat returning and more like a failing life-support system—a haunting reminder of fragility within machinery. Venera’s genius lies in rendering the mechanical haunted: drum machines clatter like broken factory equipment, static bursts hiss like interference from another plane, and amid the bleakness, there exists a strange, meditative serenity. Repetition becomes hypnotic, decay itself rendered beautiful.
Guest appearances punctuate the album with spectral humanity. On All Midnights, Chelsea Wolfe’s vocals arrive like a conjuring, her slow, sensual anguish becoming the track’s siren call. Industrial twangs and shadowy guitars frame her voice as if it were a hymn to rust and neon, bridging digital and human worlds. Wolfe floats between spectral whispers and electronic winds, embodying memory and loss in a landscape that seems to have forgotten warmth. Similarly, Caroline introduces FKA twigs as a spectral light within the machinery. Her airy, delicate delivery initially contrasts sharply with the album’s oppressive density, only to dissolve into distortion and metallic clangs. Twigs becomes the ghost in Venera’s machine—ethereal, fragile, profoundly human—enriching rather than disrupting the album’s world.
Venera balances aggression and restraint with precision. Asteroxylon evokes wind rushing through a dying city, bass and static coalescing into something uncomfortably alive. There are hints of Nine Inch Nails’ mechanical funk here, but Venera keeps the sound vaporous, spectral, and untethered, suggesting a world waiting—waiting for collapse, transcendence, or simply nothing at all. On End Uncovered (featuring Dis Fig), the duo’s “less is more” philosophy shines. Sparse elements clash and coalesce with surgical precision. Dis Fig’s fragile vocals glide over aggressive, restless beats, sparking tension like a live wire. The track culminates in a quiet, emotionally seismic catharsis reminiscent of Björk at her most volatile.
Even in the album’s darker corners, the tension is palpable. uuu773 drags listeners into echoing subterranean corridors, a descent where every bass thrum and ghostly synth suggests imminent danger. The sense of cinematic dread here is tangible—silence itself feels heavy, as if carrying the weight of a world long abandoned. As the record progresses, Meridians transports listeners over a neon-lit cityscape both beautiful and broken, where shimmered synths convey anxiety and alienation. The track feels like a drone flight over ruins, questioning whether this is progress or extinction.
Finally, decreation closes the album with ritualistic minimalism, as if Venera were performing a requiem for the digital age. Deep bass rumbles like the earth mourning itself, and every haunting synth accent is deliberate, the fading heartbeat of a dying world echoing in the silence that follows. By the end, Exinfinite does not simply finish—it fades, leaving emptiness as meaningful as sound, space as vital as vibration.
At its core, Exinfinite is an album of contrasts: noise and stillness, flesh and circuitry, light and shadow. It is cold yet profoundly emotional, distant yet immersive. Each track builds upon the last not through accumulation but subtraction, stripping away all extraneous elements until only raw emotion filtered through machinery remains. The album is not a collection of songs—it is a fully realized world. Immersing oneself in it is akin to witnessing an ending, or perhaps, the fragile birth of something new.
Venera has created an opus of haunting beauty, one that is simultaneously cinematic, spectral, and viscerally human. Exinfinite is not just listened to; it is felt, inhabited, and remembered.
NOTABLE TRACKS:
All Midnights (feat. Chelsea Wolfe)
End Uncovered (feat. Dis Fig)
Caroline (feat. FKA Twigs)