Temic “Ceiba” Album Review by: Antoine Karam

Oct 1, 2026

Supergroups usually fail in a predictable way. Five accomplished musicians arrive carrying the habits of the bands that made them famous, and what comes out sounds like a negotiation between résumés rather than a record. Temic have now released two albums without falling into that trap, and the second one, Ceiba, out October 2nd on Season of Mist, is the more impressive escape. Three years after the debut Terror Management Theory charted in the Netherlands and reached the upper reaches of the iTunes metal chart, the band return with eleven tracks and just under sixty-six minutes of music that sounds like one band rather than five careers.

The clearest evidence is in what the record declines to do. These are players with pedigrees from Devin Townsend, Mike Portnoy’s Shattered Fortress, Neal Morse Band, Haken, Shining, Maraton and Big City, and the temptation to let everyone take a lap is enormous. Instead the solos here are relatively few, and almost all of them stay inside the song rather than interrupting it to make a point. The band have said all five members contributed to the writing, and you can hear that in the restraint. Technique is in service of structure throughout, which for a lineup this decorated is a genuine act of discipline.

The title holds the key to how the album is built, and it is worth taking literally. In Maya cosmology the ceiba is an axis mundi, a tree whose roots reach the underworld and whose crown touches the heavens, a vertical connection between realms. Ceiba is sequenced the same way. This is not a record with a conventional dynamic arc that rises and falls. It is a record that climbs. Everything about the running order makes sense once you stop expecting peaks and troughs and start hearing altitude.

It begins underground. Asunder is ninety seconds of thunderclap and spoken word, the sound of the lightning strike the cover art depicts, and it hands directly into Ashes, where the band state their case without hedging. A driving riff carries the song, the chorus is immediately memorable, and the handoff from guitar into keyboards around the three-minute mark is the first sign that Eric Gillette and Diego Tejeida intend to work as a single instrument rather than two soloists sharing a room.

The lower branches are where the album does its emotional work. Ceased To Be addresses the ultimate loss from inside the experience, written from the perspective of someone dying surrounded by the people who love them, and the remarkable thing is how unafraid of melody it is. This could have been a dirge. It is closer to uplift. Broken then strips almost everything away, a mournful piece built on clean reverbed guitar and ghostly synth that never once reaches for a climax. Placing the album’s most restrained song that early is a bold call, and it works because the record is not trying to build tension in the usual way.

Casting Stone is the technical summit and probably the best thing here. Across nine minutes it moves through complex riffing, staccato rhythms and slower chord work without ever feeling assembled, and both Gillette and Tejeida fit concise solos into a structure that genuinely has no room to spare. See Myself follows with the album’s sharpest teeth, a harsher vocal, faster riffing, and a guitar-against-keyboard exchange that is the one moment where the band let themselves show off. They have earned it by then.

The arrival worth noting is Miguel Pereira. The debut used a guest bassist, which makes Ceiba the first Temic album recorded by a settled five-piece, and the difference registers. The bass is not holding down a floor here, it is an active voice, audible and mobile across the tricky metrical shifts that Simen Sandnes negotiates underneath. A band that writes collectively needs a rhythm section that can carry an argument rather than just keep time, and this one can.

Which brings us to the final climb, and to the one criticism that has followed this record around. Several listeners have noted that the last stretch slows down when you might expect a final surge, and on a conventionally structured album that would be a real flaw. On this one I think it is the design. Parting the Waves Inside is seven minutes of gradual brightening, Night of Veils is a brief and tender pause, Alone is the loneliest thing here, and As Long As We Last takes ten minutes to rise from near silence to a solo that finally breaks around the nine-minute mark before settling into an echoing voice. That is not an album running out of energy. That is an album reaching the top of the tree. Whether you find it moving or merely long will depend almost entirely on whether you accept the ascent as the structure rather than as a failure to deliver one.

Ceiba is an unusually confident second album and the record that converts Temic from an interesting collection of names into a band with an identity of its own. The production is clean enough that every instrument and backing vocal is legible without the mix ever sounding sterile, Fredrik Bergersen Klemp sings with a control that knows exactly when to pull back, and the writing is strong enough to carry sixty-six minutes without padding. My one honest reservation is that the record asks for your full attention from start to finish and does not reward being dipped into. That is a reasonable thing for a concept album about loss to ask. It is also the reason this will reward you more on the fourth listen than on the first.

My favourites are Casting Stone, which is the most complete piece of music here and the one I would use to explain this band to somebody, Ashes for sheer opening conviction, and As Long As We Last, which I resisted and then did not. Two further observations. First, the video for Ceased To Be was filmed in the Yucatán Peninsula beneath an actual ceiba and inside a cenote, with Anna Kirse playing a woman welcomed into the afterlife by Ah Puch, and the fact that the band went to the physical place the album is named after says something about how seriously they take their own concept. Second, the album is touring Europe through October with Kingcrow in support, and material this dependent on dynamics tends to be transformed in a room.

Pre-order / stream Ceiba: https://orcd.co/temicceiba

Rating: 9/10

ALBUM DETAILS

Album: Ceiba
Artist: Temic
Type: Second studio album
Label: Season of Mist
Release Date: October 2nd, 2026
Runtime: 65:58

Tracklist

Asunder (1:35)
Ashes (4:55)
Beyond the Voice (3:58)
Ceased To Be (6:26)
Broken (4:45)
Casting Stone (9:16)
See Myself (6:38)
Parting the Waves Inside (7:24)
Night of Veils (3:38)
Alone (7:02)
As Long As We Last (10:21)

Band Members

Fredrik Bergersen Klemp – vocals
Eric Gillette – guitars, backing vocals
Diego Tejeida – keyboards, sound design
Miguel Pereira – bass
Simen Sandnes – drums

Additional Personnel

Producer, engineer, mixing and mastering credits are not documented in the label announcement or in any of the published reviews consulted.
Cover artwork credit is not named in the available materials.
Band photography: Mountain Head Media.
“Ceased To Be” video directed by Cesar Mendiburu, produced by Mountain Head Media, screenplay by Esteban Erosa, starring Anna Kirse and Zizinete Marave, cinematography by Dreyken Hinojosa and Linda Alcocer, underwater photography by Esther White.

European Tour 2026, with Kingcrow