Breathless Spirit
Artist: VÖLUR & CARES
Genre: Metal
Record Label: Batke Records
Release Date: 8 August 2025
When the guitar is in absentia, will one miss it? When you strip doom metal of its backbone, does its form get reinvented, or are you left wobbling around an empty shell? When you choose mood over momentum, does it make you more creative, or just evasive? These are the thoughts rattling around my head as I listen to Breathless Spirit, the fourth album from Canada’s avant-garde trio Völur, created in collaboration with UK/Canadian producer James Beardmore (aka Cares)
Built around the core of Lucas Gadke (bass, vocals, keyboards), Laura C. Bates (electric violin, viola, vocals), and Justin Ruppel (drums, percussion), Breathless Spirit finds Völur pushing their sound into more atmospheric and textural territory. With the addition of Cares on piano, theremin, and ambient layers, the album gains a unique spectral edge and sense of depth. It’s dark and broody, at times reminiscent of Earth’s slow-motion weight, but injected with a striking sense of movement and melody. There’s a neofolk resonance here, too, as some moments call to mind Wovenhand’s gothic pulse, yet it’s all underpinned by a subtle jazz undertone. It’s difficult to categorise but fully resolute; each piece flows into the next with cohesion and hypnotic beauty.
The album draws its inspiration from The Saga of Grettir the Strong, a 13th-century Icelandic tale of exile and defiance. It’s the story of a solitary figure, iron-willed, misunderstood, and shaped by isolation. Völur take these themes and let them guide the music’s emotional landscape. The result isn’t so much a retelling, but a translation into sound: long, spacious passages that echo with distance, sharp turns that perhaps mirror Grettir’s unpredictable path, and textures that carry a sense of strength as well as vulnerability. It’s cinematic and visceral in the way it allows feeling to build slowly through tension and release by means of carefully constructed layering.
“Windbourne Sorcery I” opens with a near-medieval delicacy and sound, where I want to close my eyes and let it sweep me somewhere far, maybe not Iceland, but Tangier at dusk. It’s soft, deliberate, expansive. Each instrument is handled with a tactile quality, emerging with clarity and intention. There is no murk in the production and no overdriven sludge; each note is discernible and glows on its own. Then, just as I’m beginning to settle in, the song detonates. That final shift into heaviness is sudden but not inevitable, and it sets the tone. Völur are about to go dark and will do so on their terms.
The title track, “Breathless Spirit,” is a shape-shifter. It veers into post-metal territory, then slinks into blues, then into something even stranger. It doesn’t sit still, and it doesn’t want you to either. It all coils around one’s head like smoke. And yes, there’s a fade-out which I’m willing to forgive as it feels earned: less like a cop-out, and more like something slipping back into the fog it came from.
With “Glamr,” the trio dive a bit more into the experimental deep end. Listening to it feels like trudging through tar: it’s dense, surreal, perhaps a little maddening, yet never boring. This is music that keeps shifting under one’s feet, revealing new textures every time you return. It’s layered, multifaceted, and, most importantly, still unfolding, even after several listens. Völur and Cares have built a sound rooted in folklore, emotion, and refusal to conform. I could listen to Breathless Spirit again and again, and would still not be able to categorise it and put my finger on what exactly makes it such a satisfying listen. Perhaps in the hollowed space left by one instrument or another, we glimpse the true shape of intention, unconfined, aching to be felt. This one will inhabit the edges of your memory long after it’s over. Let it haunt you.