Stoned Jesus “Songs to Moon” Album Review by: Jorge Pozo

Oct 3, 2026

Seventeen years after Igor Sydorenko first took the name to a Kyiv stage, Stoned Jesus remains one of the most stubbornly misunderstood bands in heavy music. For a large part of its audience the band is still frozen in 2012, the year Seven Thunders Roar gave the world “I’m the Mountain” and its thirteen patient, odd-metered minutes. Sydorenko has spent the decade since refusing to repeat that moment, moving through the restless detours of The Harvest, the alternative polish of Pilgrims and the long-form ambition of Father Light, before opening the Songs to… trilogy with last year’s sun-scorched Songs to Sun. Only twelve months later the second panel of that triptych has arrived, and Songs to Moon is the record where the trilogy’s architecture finally becomes visible.

The best way into Songs to Moon is to treat it as an exercise in subtraction: it starts at full density and sheds weight, layer by layer, until one voice and one acoustic guitar are all that remain. “Under the Skin” opens with the same inhale that closed Songs to Sun, physically joining the two records, and for the first time on a Stoned Jesus album the vocals land within seconds. Its churning post-metal, revived after the band toured with Cult of Luna, gets a jagged second voice from Andrew Rodin‘s harsh screams, while Yurii Ciel steers a proggy middle passage deeper into shadow. “Velvet” then states the album’s emotional premise, a narrator who is falling and wondering whether the fall will ever end. The song sat unfinished for about five years until Sydorenko wrote its chorus roughly two months before the sessions, and that late hook turns its doomgaze haze into an alternate-history Seattle single, an idea the grainy nineties-style video by Mykyta Donets embraces fully.

From there the album turns inward. “ZYX”, its title an alphabet read backward like a countdown, sets the pattern of swinging between heavy passages and acoustic stillness. “Syzgy”, the band’s first instrumental, sits at the exact center of the tracklist and, by design, of the whole trilogy; beneath its Camel-like melancholy, the bells carry one melody from Songs to Sun‘s “Shadowland”, one from “Jackal” and a 7/8 figure that will open Songs to Earth, a small alignment of three celestial bodies written into a bridge between albums. “Jackal” itself is the record’s most theatrical moment, a mini prog opera of ghostly vocals, a lullaby that grows more threatening with each return and half-spoken passages that sound like the narrator arguing with himself. When the distortion breaks back in, some will hear it as preachy; I hear the final protest before surrender, the album spending its last anger so the closing songs can exist without it.

The final stretch is the bravest thing Stoned Jesus has recorded. “Window in My Room”, the longest track at more than eight minutes, leaves only acoustic guitar and Sydorenko‘s hushed voice, following the path of Led Zeppelin III, Opeth‘s Damnation and Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies, while “One More Empty Day” closes the circle with no catharsis at all, like the grey morning after a long night. Sydorenko‘s own production, with Andy Rosczyk engineering at Goblin Sound Studio in Cologne and Karl Daniel Lidén mixing and mastering at Studio Tri-Lamb, is clear without being clinical, letting the quiet breathe as fully as the noise. That is why the “more of the same” verdicts miss the point: the ingredients are familiar, but the meaning lives in the order, not the parts. The fair criticism is that the second half demands a patience shuffle-era listeners may not give, and fans hoping for stoner walls of sound will feel left behind.

Stoned Jesus has made a record that only fully works in one sitting, which is both its greatest strength and its main barrier to entry. The hooks are there, especially on “Velvet”, and the concept is executed with an attention to detail that rewards close listening. It is not the heaviest chapter of the trilogy, and it was never meant to be. It is the darkest, the most patient and the most honest, and it makes the promise of Songs to Earth even more intriguing.

My favorite tracks are “Velvet”, “Syzgy” and “Window in My Room”. “Velvet” is the obvious single, but “Syzgy” is the one I keep returning to, because its bell melodies turn the whole trilogy into a puzzle box. Play Songs to Sun and Songs to Moon back to back and listen for the breath that links them. Worth noting too: the trilogy will close next year with just two twenty-minute tracks, and while Yurii Ciel plays drums on the record, Ihor Biriuchenko now holds the live seat.

Get your copy here: https://redirect.season-of-mist.com/SJSongstoMoon

Rating: 8/10