Gloombound — Dreaming Delusion Review

Funeral Doom Beneath Blackened Frost

Gloombound’s sound sits firmly within funeral death doom, but other elements creep in — atmospheric black metal’s cold air and cavernous dark ambient. These bleed together, making individual lines challenging to separate — deliberately so.

Tremors from the funeral doom base pulse beneath black metal frost, while dark ambient drones fill every gap. The mix traps you. Chaos builds a choking gloom. This is not music that moves forward — it descends.

Additionally, the atmosphere is hazy, like a dream dissolving as you try to recall it — oppressive, but softly smothering rather than violent. Ethereal synth pads and drones leak in from another plane, especially across the fifteen-minute title hymn, which acts as the album’s gravitational centre.

Ritual Space and Decaying Sound

The structure and pacing suggest a recording approach that favours live-room ambience, allowing natural decay to shape the compositions. Minimal editing lets imperfections become part of the ritual texture. Layered guitars — often three or four deep — form a fog-wall rather than a traditional riff stack.

Short hymns like Salvation and Mist function as interstitial rites, likely recorded as textural anchors rather than full compositions.

The production aesthetic is raw but intentional — low-mid saturation for sepulchral weight, high-end roll-off to avoid modern sheen, and reverb used as architecture rather than effect. The space itself becomes the instrument.

When Riffs Loom

Gloombound’s composition and arrangement — both instrumental and musical — are crushing, like waves battering rock. Even the devilmanship is controlled and deliberate. The guitars are drenched in reverb, low-tuned, slow, and tectonic, saturated with grainy, cavernous texture. Long, sustained chords bleed into one another, occasionally layering into drifting harmonics that form a fog-wall rather than riffs.

When they strike, they don’t riff — they loom.