Four years is a long time to wait. Port Noir’s last outing, Cuts, arrived in 2022 and quietly landed in the lap of anyone paying close enough attention — which, frankly, not enough people were. The Stockholm trio has been doing this for over a decade now, shaping their own unhurried corner of progressive metal with a precision and personality that most bands twice their profile can’t touch. The Dark We Keep is the album that should finally change that.
It’s their fifth record, their heaviest, and — there’s no neutral way to say this — one of the most assured metal albums you’ll hear this year.
Start with the cover: a slab of absolute black with a single narrow column of diffuse white light splitting it off-centre. It tells you everything. This isn’t an album interested in showing its hand. The light doesn’t illuminate anything — it just exists, cold and thin, against all that darkness. That tension between restraint and revelation runs through every track here like a load-bearing wire.
Opener “Complicated” sets the template. It’s not what you’d call subtle — the synths arrive like fog rolling in off the Stockholm waterfront — but it’s controlled. Love Andersson’s vocals sit low and spectral in the mix, circling a riff that guitarist Andreas Hollstrand and bassist Andersson lock into with the kind of locked-groove commitment that lesser trios fumble. The lyrics — buried deep, buried deep / carried by bleeding feet — establish the album’s emotional register: something toxic being kept down, kept inside, turning bad in the dark.
“Redshift” opens with a blast beat that absolutely nobody was expecting. That move, more than anything else, signals the shift from where Port Noir have been. There’s a Swedish-language passage midway through that adds a layer of rawness you rarely hear in this kind of polished modern prog-metal context — it doesn’t feel like a gimmick, it feels like something that slipped through the armour. When the riff hits again after that section, it hits harder for it.
The middle third of the record is where Port Noir earn their reputation. “Ebb and Flow” is a Möbius strip of dread — the lyrics actually reference one — and it builds to a breakdown in the fourth minute that you feel in your molars. It’s not gratuitous; it pays off a slow, patient build with something that earns the word “pulverizing.” The structural thinking here is sophisticated. These aren’t songs that simply escalate. They recede. They wait. “My Destroyer” operates the same way: the second half detonates in a way that makes the restrained first half feel like an ambush setup.
Andersson’s voice is the album’s defining instrument. He sits in the same tonal neighbourhood as Jonas Renkse from Katatonia — that clean, slightly wounded register that makes violence feel elegiac — but there’s something specifically nocturnal about what he does here. These are songs about night: about what happens in the dark, what’s kept there, what feeds in the absence of light. His vocal on “We Shall Die Together” — the album’s closer — is genuinely arresting. It doesn’t try to be a stadium moment. It’s smaller and more honest than that, and consequently hits like something you weren’t braced for.
“Vargtimmen” — Swedish for “the wolf hour,” that 3am dead zone between night and dawn — clocks in at just over a minute and does exactly what a good interlude should: stops the album breathing for long enough that when “Burst” arrives, the air re-enters the room differently. “Burst” is the band at their anthemic best, a song with one of the year’s better choruses sitting over a riff that wouldn’t embarrass early Lacuna Coil on its best day.
The drum production deserves a flag. Andreas Wiberg plays the record brilliantly — his fills on “Redshift” have real dexterity, and his blast beat cameos are used surgically rather than decoratively — but the kit sounds processed in a way that flattens some of his dynamics. It’s a production call that cost them something. A more organic drum sound would’ve made an already heavy record sound genuinely enormous.
That aside: The Dark We Keep is a record built on earned conviction. It was delayed by a water leak, a studio relocation, a label change, a mixing process that ended with the band doing it themselves. That provenance matters less than the result, but the result is an album that sounds like something worked for — unhurried, considered, and entirely Port Noir’s own. They’re not chasing Katatonia, they’re not chasing Deftones, they’re not chasing anything. They’re just digging deeper into their own darkness and finding out what’s down there.
The answer, it turns out, is a very good album.
The Dark We Keep is out May 15 via Century Media / Inside Out.
I’m Drew, the founder and editor of Front of the Stage. I have a strong love for music and photography, which started at a very young age. There’s just something I love about experiencing live music and capturing memories that will last a lifetime, and that’s how Front of the Stage came to be.
