Mark your calendars for December 2nd, 2025, because a musical storm is brewing from the shrouded corners of Scotland and Norway. After two years in the making, the mysterious solo project MSLi 69 is finally set to drop their debut full-length, ‘Tree’, and it sounds like a much-needed correction to the "world of the bland" they've clearly set out to challenge.
In an age of digital perfection and over-polished production, MSLi 69 is throwing down the gauntlet by recording every note and beat of ‘Tree’ 100% in analogue to tape. This commitment to a raw, messy, and live sound is immediately apparent. It’s a bold artistic choice that ensures the music cuts through with a palpable sense of grit and immediacy, perfectly suiting their dark musical vision.
An intoxicating and, sometimes, terrifying blend of ambient black metal, the project combines the crushing drums and spellbinding, ghoulish vocals of the black metal tradition with mesmerising guitar harmonies and the dark, textured song structures of ambient music. The result is something truly experimental and unique.
The album opens with ‘Exordium’, a track that expertly sets the stage not with a typical deafening maelstrom, but with a spiked atmosphere that slowly crawls under your skin. Lingering bass notes are layered over haunting howls, creating steep atmospherics that etch themselves upon your brain. It’s a testament to the power of restraint.
The lead track, ‘Hollow’, digs in with creeping guitar work and a more flickering, textured sound, underpinned by tempered, steady drums. Here, the hybrid is snarling and restrained, a marriage of black metal’s intensity with more pronounced melodic touches.
But perhaps the album’s most intriguing moment arrives with ‘Arouse’. Cutting through the messier tracks with a more orchestrated sound, the piece delivers on the album’s promise of tension. Gentle, rolling melodics and lingering, falling guitar lines are placed with precision, creating a growing sense of dread that never quite releases. It expertly tows the line between chaotic, gritty, damning metal, and lighter, expertly textured passages that will genuinely hook the listener.
Other tracks like ‘plummet’, ‘Forlornness’, and the wonderfully titled ‘the dream within a dream within a dream’ continue this theme of an expansive and challenging journey. They showcase a constantly shifting creative drive, offering spiralling elements of black metal that crush, collide, and evolve through different views and perspectives. Sometimes the sound if beautiful, carved from lighter moments that contrast the rolling ambience and darker tones, other times, they’re stormy, tempestuous throws that drag you down and have you holding on for dear life.
MSLi 69’s ‘Tree’ is a journey into isolation, recorded across a unique timeline in Scotland and Norway. If you’re yearning for music that is both brutal and beautiful, raw and orchestrated, you’d be a fool to miss this.
You pre-order your copy of the album today and RSVP to the free listening party on Bandcamp on December 2, 2025, at 7:00 AM GMT+11.
