Uncanny Times is the seventh album from funeral doom outfit, Pantheist.
PANTHEIST
Some bands are built for speed. Pantheist have always been built for endurance. Founded by multi-instrumentalist Kostas Panagiotou in Antwerp in 2000, the project began life as a one-man act before relocating to the UK in 2004, and over the quarter-century since, it has become one of the most quietly respected names in British funeral doom: never the loudest voice in the room, but rarely anything less than compelling. Uncanny Times is the band’s seventh full-length album with a title that could hardly be more fitting for the age we are living through.
The opening track, The Final Journey, was written musically around fifteen years ago, only to be shelved while Panagiotou waited for the right voice to bring it to life. That voice turned out to belong to soprano Linda Dumitru, who first recorded with the band on 2024’s Kings Must Die EP and has since become a full member, contributing vocals, lyrics, and even acoustic guitar.
The title itself deserves a moment of attention. The uncanny, as Freud famously framed it, is not simply frightening but the familiar made strange, the home that no longer feels like home, the face you recognise that is somehow wrong. It is a near-perfect description of how much of the world feels in 2026, and it is also a near-perfect description of what the best funeral doom does: it takes the most basic building blocks of heavy music, slows them to a crawl and stretches them until they become something alien and otherworldly. Whether by accident or design, Pantheist have chosen a title that works as both a comment on the times and a description of their own sound.
ARGONAUTA
The line-up has been substantially rebuilt since the Closer To God era. Alongside Panagiotou on vocals and keyboards and Dumitru on vocals, Atanas Kyurkchiev handles guitars, Matt Strangis takes over bass duties, and Fanel Lefterache sits behind the kit. It is a significant change of personnel for a band that has seen plenty of comings and goings over the years, and one of the questions hanging over Uncanny Times is how quickly this new unit has gelled. On the evidence of this album, the answer appears to be remarkably well.
The move to Argonauta is itself a significant moment. The signing ends a long stretch in which Pantheist self-released their work through the band’s own Melancholic Realm Productions imprint, and the band were refreshingly open at the time about the toll that going it alone had taken. Few bands of their stature have done so much with so little machinery behind them: Pantheist have played more than a hundred shows across fifteen countries, sharing stages with the likes of Esoteric, Skepticism, Evoken, Saturnus, Mourning Beloveth and Tiamat, and their debut O Solitude remains a cornerstone record for many doom fans, old and new, over two decades after its release. With a label behind them for the first time in years, Uncanny Times has a chance to reach the wider audience the band have long deserved.
CLEARING THE GROUND
Pantheist’s catalogue has always moved in cycles rather than straight lines. O Solitude, released in 2003, and 2005’s Amartia were rooted firmly in classic funeral doom, slow and sorrowful and drenched in grief. Journey Through Lands Unknown broadened the palette, before the 2011 self-titled album took a bold sidestep, flirting with seventies prog, new wave and gothic darkwave in a way that showed just how far beyond the genre’s borders Panagiotou was willing to roam. In 2018, Seeking Infinity swung the pendulum back towards the slow and the sorrowful, yet without discarding the wider influences the band had absorbed in the meantime, and Closer To God and Kings Must Die continued to refine that balance. Uncanny Times, in that light, reads less like a reinvention than a culmination: a record that gathers up a quarter-century of experiments and channels them into the band’s most expansive statement to date.
It is worth remembering how this new chapter began. Kings Must Die, released in March 2024, was a transitional record in every sense: its title track featured Jake Harding of Grave Lines on lead vocals, Jeremy Lewis on guitar leads and behind the desk in his last outing before stepping back from full membership, and Dumitru in her first studio appearance with the band. By then the band were based in Cardiff, a city with a small but fiercely dedicated heavy music scene. In hindsight, it reads like a bridge between eras – the sound of a band clearing the ground before building something new on it.
FUNERAL DOOM
It is also worth placing that catalogue in a wider context. Funeral doom has always been one of metal’s most niche corners, built on the foundations laid by the likes of Thergothon, Skepticism and Esoteric, and the UK in particular has a proud history of slow, sorrowful heaviness stretching back to the early days of My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost and Anathema. Pantheist sit somewhere between those two traditions: the glacial pace and vast spaces of funeral doom, and the melodic melancholy and gothic grandeur of the British death-doom school. What has always set them apart is a willingness to look beyond both, to folk, progressive rock, ambient and classical music, and Uncanny Times appears to lean further into that openness than ever.
The Final Journey opens proceedings at just under thirteen and a half minutes, and as a first impression of this incarnation of Pantheist, it is hard to imagine a more fitting choice. It begins in near stillness, with keyboards that seem to drift in from a great distance, before the weight arrives – slow, deliberate and crushing, but never ugly. Dumitru’s soprano is the revelation here, rising above the murk like a shaft of light through cathedral glass, while Panagiotou’s deeper growls and cleans act as ballast beneath her. The lyric deals with mortality and a spiritual leave-taking, threaded through with images of the natural world, and the sense of a soul preparing to step out of the body and into the unknown is beautifully sustained.
Allain’s guest leads, meanwhile, provide some of the most emotive guitar work the band have recorded, mournful and melodic in a way that recalls the finest moments of the British death-doom tradition. That the music sat waiting for a decade and a half for its singer is easy to believe once you hear it; it simply would not work without her. As a statement of intent for a reshaped band, it could hardly be any clearer: this is Pantheist at their most ambitious, and their most emotionally direct.
LAUGHING FALCON
Laughing Falcon follows, and its title is one of the album’s most intriguing. The laughing falcon is a bird of prey native to the forests of Central and South America, named for its extraordinary, almost human cry, and in parts of Latin America its call has long been treated as an omen. Panagiotou recorded the falcon samples that feature on the track himself while in Panama, so the bird’s own voice is woven into the fabric of the song.
I would expect it to use those field recordings as a recurring motif, an eerie, half-mocking presence haunting the music, and it looks set to be one of the record’s most atmospheric moments – a reminder that the uncanny can be found in nature as easily as in the news. It is also a very Pantheist way of working: rather than reaching for stock sound effects, Panagiotou went into the field and captured the real thing, and that commitment to authenticity runs right through the band’s history.
KUEBIKO
Kuebiko is an inspired title, and a typically erudite one. In Japanese mythology, Kuebiko is a scarecrow deity, a figure who knows everything about the world yet cannot walk, condemned to watch events unfold without being able to act. The word has also been adopted in modern times to describe the numb exhaustion that sets in after witnessing one senseless tragedy after another, and either reading fits snugly within an album called Uncanny Times.
Placed at the centre of the first half, I would expect this to be one of the heaviest and most oppressive passages on the record, the musical equivalent of standing motionless while the world burns. There is a neat irony, too, in a scarecrow that sees everything and does nothing appearing on a record released into an age of endless scrolling, where so many of us know exactly what is happening in the world and feel powerless to change any of it.
Entropy is the track with the most unusual guest list, and potentially the most surprising sound. Ian Arkley’s lyre and dulcimer bring an ancient, folk-inflected texture rarely heard in funeral doom, while the drum programming by Obradovic and Kyurkchiev and a separate mix from Jeremy Lewis suggest a piece that may stand slightly apart from the rest of the album sonically.
The title points towards the slow, inevitable decline of all things into disorder – fertile ground for a band so concerned with decay and impermanence – and the pairing of old-world instruments with a concept from modern physics is exactly the kind of collision Pantheist have always excelled at. At a time when so much heavy music is polished to a uniform sheen, the decision to hand one track to a different mix engineer and build it around hand-played ancient instruments suggests a band more interested in character than consistency, and that is a risk worth applauding.
THE EMOTIONAL SUMMIT
Ithaca Out Of Sight is the longest track on the album at thirteen minutes and forty seconds, and on paper, it is the record’s emotional summit. The title draws on the Odyssey, with Ithaca as the long-sought home that Odysseus spends a decade trying to reach, and for a Greek-born songwriter, there is surely an echo of Cavafy’s famous poem too, in which the journey itself matters more than the destination.
To have Ithaca out of sight, then, is to be adrift, cut off from purpose, and the published lyric leans into exactly that: despair, apathy, and the struggle to find meaning. Clemenger’s cello, Dumitru’s acoustic guitar and a guest solo from Lewis should give the track enormous textural range, and I would expect it to move from intimate, almost chamber-like passages to the full, glacial weight of the band at its heaviest. It is the track I am most eager to hear, and the one most likely to define how this album is remembered.
Requiem For Your World closes the album, and a title like this hardly suggests a happy ending. Pantheist closers have a habit of bringing everything that came before into focus, and after a record built around journeys, omens, exhaustion and decay, a requiem feels like the only possible destination. The second-person address is telling, too: this is not a lament for the band’s world but for ours, and it would be a surprise if it did not end in the kind of slow, devastating fade that leaves the listener sitting in silence long after the final note has died away. Given how much of the album seems to deal with journeys and departures, it would also be fitting if the closer circled back to the opener, bringing The Final Journey’s sense of farewell to its logical conclusion and tying the whole record together as a single, unbroken arc.
UNCANNY TIMES
What Uncanny Times does best is marry the patience of classic funeral doom with the broader emotional and textural palette that Pantheist have accumulated over the years. On the strength of The Final Journey alone, Dumitru’s arrival has transformed the band, adding a soaring, almost liturgical dimension that contrasts beautifully with Panagiotou’s darker register. Where many funeral doom bands rely on a single unbroken mood, Pantheist have always been more interested in light and shade, and the soprano gives them a brighter light than ever before. Soprano vocals in doom are hardly new, of course – the gothic metal boom of the nineties made them almost a cliché – but Dumitru is used sparingly and intelligently, as a counterweight rather than a centrepiece, and that restraint is what makes her contributions land with such force.
It also helps that Panagiotou remains one of the most thoughtful writers in the genre. Funeral doom can too easily become wallowing for its own sake, but his work has always been rooted in ideas – philosophy, mythology, science and travel – and the subjects on display here, from Japanese folklore and Homeric epic to thermodynamics and the wildlife of Panama, show a restless, curious mind at work. That this is also a novelist who once published a science-fiction book to help fund an album should tell you everything about the depth of his commitment.
SUSTAINED ATMOSPHERE
Funeral doom lives and dies by its ability to sustain atmosphere, and across six long tracks, the line between hypnotic and exhausting can be a thin one. The heavy reliance on guest musicians, while a lovely tribute to the band’s extended family, also raises the possibility of an album that feels slightly fragmented, with Entropy in particular mixed by a different hand from the rest.
And with so much of the line-up new, it remains to be seen whether this incarnation of the band has the chemistry to carry an entire album as convincingly as it carries the opener. There is also the simple matter of accessibility: an album with two thirteen-minute epics and very little in the way of conventional hooks is never going to win over listeners who are not already converts to the slow and heavy, though it seems fair to say that is not who this record is for.
THE FINAL JOURNEY
Times sounds like the work of a band who know precisely who they are and are still eager to discover who else they might become. A seventh album that opens with a song fifteen years in the making, takes in falcon calls recorded in Panama, a Japanese scarecrow god and the long road home to Ithaca, and closes with a requiem for the world we live in is not the work of a band treading water.
UK fans will also be able to hear the new material live, with the band booked for NorthWest Doom Fest among a string of dates across 2026 and 2027 that also includes Symphonic Metal Echoes in Romania – and if The Final Journey is anything to go by, these songs will sound even more overwhelming in a darkened room. Whether it ultimately stands alongside Amartia and Seeking Infinity among the high points of the Pantheist catalogue is a verdict that the full record will deliver – but for now, in genuinely uncanny times, it is hard to think of a better soundtrack for staring into the abyss.
Pantheist: Website