Belgian avant-garde outfit Emptiness have announced their return with a seventh studio album titled Nowhere Speaks. Set for release on 17th July 2026 via Season of Mist, the ten-track record marks a deliberate and mind-bending structural link to their past work.
Fans have spent years debating the abrupt, mid-riff silence that ended their 2014 masterpiece Nothing But The Whole, and it turns out the band were playing the long game. Nowhere Speaks opens exactly where that record left off, picking up the same riff mid-bar. To seal the cycle, the new album’s final track loops back to the very first riff of the 2014 release, creating a continuous, infinite loop between the two records.
Musically, this looks to be a shift away from the distortion-free, pandemic-born isolation of 2021’s Vide. After four years of rehearsal and testing, the band captured nearly the entire record live in the studio, bringing back a sense of weight, intensity, and full-band physicality. It’s a return to the dense, immersive death/black metal textures that put the Brussels-based group on the map in the first place.
Produced internally by the band’s own Jérémie Bézier and Olivier J.L.W., the album is described as a “dimension without coordinates”. It’s clearly not intended to be a comfortable listen, but for those who enjoy the likes of Blut Aus Nord or Deathspell Omega, this will be one to mark in the calendar.
Album tracklist:
- Nothing but the Whole (Part 2)
- The Threat
- Nowhere Speaks
- Darkness Commands
- Words to Wind
- One Must See All
- When the Whole Arrives
- The Clash of Forces
- Next in Line
- All for Nothing
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