There’s a certain joy that arises when a progressive metal band decides to “rebirth” a track, because you never quite know what you’re going to get. Sometimes it’s just a clean mix and a new drum sample. But every so often, a band goes, “What if we rebuilt this entire thing from the astral plane upward?” and then actually does it. Apeiron Bound’s “Astral Reflection – Rebirth” is very obviously the latter, a reconstruction project that feels less like a remix and more like the musical equivalent of tearing down your house because you didn’t like the vibe in the foyer.
The track opens with that suspiciously grand, cinematic energy; the kind that lets you know someone spent way too long tweaking orchestral swells at 3 a.m. It’s heavy, it’s layered, it’s absolutely drowning in textures, and it comes across like someone desperately trying to wrestle the entire emotional spectrum into a single metal track. And, impossibly, it works. Everything hits with the confidence of a band that knows exactly how ridiculous progressive metal can get and has decided to sprint toward the edge anyway.
The project’s mastermind, Andrew Stout, composes like someone who once looked at the chaos of modern metal and concluded it simply wasn’t complicated enough. There’s a meticulousness to the arrangements as every transition feels engineered, every riff feels placed with tweezers that suggests a man who cannot rest until the music expresses something unusually philosophical. Themes of identity and transformation aren’t just sprinkled in; they’re basically stapled to the track’s forehead. It’s sincere, surprisingly emotional, and absolutely determined to make you think about yourself whether you want to or not.
And yet, for all its introspective weight, the track never collapses under its own ambition. Instead, it moves with this weird, graceful intensity, shifting between aggression and atmosphere as if testing how many genres it can hold before the whole structure implodes. Spoiler: it doesn’t implode. It thrives. It has big “I rebuilt my life over a long weekend” energy.
This comes on the heels of their reimagined work on Firmament: Redux, which already signaled that the band refuses to leave any idea in peace. Everything must be expanded, deconstructed, philosophically interrogated, and then wrapped in another layer of orchestration. They’re the kind of artists who look at their own songs and go, “No, this could be more.” And then they make it more.
What’s most impressive is that this isn’t just complexity for complexity’s sake. Every shift in the song feels like it carries an emotional argument. Every crescendo feels like it’s trying to communicate something cosmically relevant. Even the quieter moments sound like they’re staring directly into your soul, asking why you haven’t completed your personal growth arc yet.
“Rebirth” is frankly, a rude track. It comes at you with too much ambition to ignore, too much polish for you to dismiss as experimental noise, and too much emotional clarity for you to call it overwrought. It lands squarely in the realm of “refreshingly sincere,” the kind of music that reminds you progressive metal doesn’t have to choose between being elaborate and being meaningful.
And if this is the direction the project is leaning toward; bigger, louder, more cinematic, more narratively loaded, then the future releases are going to be dangerous in the best possible way.
In short: this track isn’t just a rebirth. It’s a declaration. And it makes one thing clear: they’re not trying to fit into the progressive metal world. They’re trying to build a new one, one unnecessarily dramatic song at a time.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
