At the time of writing, it’s a somewhat overcast Saturday in Louisville, Colorado. Rain comes and goes, the sun intermittently showing its face from behind dark, uncertain clouds. I sit with a cup of black tea at the ready, absorbing the quiet morning as I ease into the day. I have to believe that this is the ideal set of conditions for cuing up In the Garden, the recent record by Prague’s Cold Venus Revisited, released in July 2025 by CT, Spain’s Oráculo Records.
I knew little about the band before claiming this submission, but was immediately drawn to the album cover, a brutal, almost primitive monochromatic scene barely offset by the purple title text above the center image. The Bandcamp page for this record lists genre tags such as coldwave, darkwave, garage rock, post-punk, and shoegaze—all of which certainly apply here. I’d additionally suggest a black metal influence, both in the overall sound and the packaging. This is a harsh, primal, relentless set of songs, both brimming with ferocity and steeped in atmosphere, unfolding more as soundscapes with vocals adding texture rather than linear narrative.
There are seven tracks on In the Garden, with a total runtime of around 33 minutes. Throughout these seven tracks, the listener is subject to a hurricane of synth swirls, ambient guitar lines, and distant wailing vocals, all atop a bed of distorted bass guitar and tom-heavy drums. Cold Venus Revisited wants their music to wash over their audiences, taking no prisoners and offering no quarter in the process. Perhaps the apex of the record is “The Void,” the fifth track in the sequence, in which the band conjures their densest, most foreboding soundscape, their sonic mania enveloping the landscape in a dizzying climax. The result is a bleak, crushing milestone, with little offered in the way of respite or relief.
Per Cold Venus Revisited’s Bandcamp page: “In the Garden explores the fragility of identity and the struggle to reconnect with a version of yourself that feels lost to time.” Their plight is evident in these seven unruly washes of sound, each song appearing to consume the next as the sequence lumbers on, reflecting the amorphism spurred by trauma on the concept of identity. With In the Garden, their first full-length record, Cold Venus Revisited has issued a bold mission statement, one that will set them apart from their peers if by sheer force alone.
Written by Jacob Simons
