MESSIER 16 – new album out soon
- Posted on 11-10-2026
Messier 16 is a progressive metal band from Oslo, Norway. The band consists of Jonas Eide (guitars, composer, lyricist), Sondre M. Svalastog (vocals), Aleksander Ilievski (guitars, producer), Nicolo Cavallaro (bass), and Jonathan Hamre (drums).
Messier 16’s music is rooted in the metal genre but ventures into sophisticated and innovative territory, blending heavy guitar work and intense rhythms with orchestral arrangements and evocative lyrical narratives. Their compositions explore nuanced emotional and psychological themes, written in the form of portrait poetry that showcase the inner emotional lives of individuals and the actions that stem from them.
The band has released two albums so far: Iota, which examines themes of mental health and emotional struggles, and Death Poems, inspired by the publicized suicide notes of real individuals. Messier 16 is now ready with their third album, further refining their sound and exploring new musical and lyrical landscapes.
Messier 16 is known for their high-energy live performances and their ability to merge technical precision with emotional and dynamic expression, aiming for a standout presence in the Norwegian metal scene.
October 23rd the band is set to release “Shouts from the Cliffs of Heterodoxy” via Time To Kill Records.
Tracklist:
1. Nostalgia Theft Reminiscence
2. Blank Absurdist Form
3. Gloom Chaser
4. Holoparasite
5. Time-Swayed Cities
6. Glittering Afterwaves
7. Perennial Shift I – Moss
8. Perennial Shift II – Evergreen
9. Perennial Shift III – Plietesial
10. Mollusk Herald
11. Dream Heritage Veto
12. Trauma Gift Repression
Shouts from the Cliffs of Heterodoxy is an hourlong descent into the fractured landscapes of delusion. On their third full-length album, Messier 16 deliver their most ambitious and cohesive statement yet — a record that inhabits its characters as much as it describes them, drawing the listener into worlds where perception and reality blur beyond recognition.
Rather than presenting a single storyline, the album unfolds as a gallery of portraits, each song a self-contained study of a mind caught in its own distortions. The voices here are contradictory, volatile, and human: a nostalgia that grieves for something that never happened, a city dweller unable to recognise the time they live in, a cynic who tears down without ever building, a figure convinced that change can only be granted by others. Together, they form a mosaic of inner worlds — intimate, strange, and often unsettling.
Musically, the record ranges from the precision and velocity of technical black metal to the earthbound weight of doom, the ethereal scope of post-metal, and the stark beauty of choral arrangements. Every shift in style is in service of the narrative, moving seamlessly from moments of brute force to passages of stillness and introspection. The choral bookends, Nostalgia Theft Reminiscence and Trauma Gift Repression, frame the chaos between them like hands holding a fragile sphere, offering both a sense of symmetry and the reminder that beauty and disquiet can occupy the same breath.
At its heart, Shouts from the Cliffs of Heterodoxy is not a work of answers, but of questions. It resists resolution, allowing its characters to remain ambiguous, neither condemned nor redeemed. In doing so, it invites the listener to stand on the same cliff edge, to hear the shouts carried by the wind, and to decide for themselves whether they are being beckoned forward — or warned to turn back.