Some albums exist to be enjoyed. They’re meant to be consumed passively, maybe shuffled into a playlist, maybe played at a party where nobody’s really paying attention. Some albums are made to be liked.
Nightfall by Apex4X frankly does not give a single damn about being liked.
Nightfall does not sit politely on your playlist. This album does not exist solely for your comfort. It kicks your door off the hinges, drags you out into the neon-lit ruins of civilization by the collar, and screams in your face through a voice modulator set to MAXIMUM DISTORTION: “ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?”
This album does not simply want to be heard. It wants to rewire your nervous system, hijack your survival instincts, and turn your Spotify recommendations into a digital dossier of your impending rebellion.
Apex4X has made a genre-obliterating, industrial-fueled, full-scale sonic insurrection. It fuses alternative rock, dark wave, and metal into something so dense, so aggressive, so utterly defiant, it might actually break through the simulation we’re all trapped in.
Cybernetic synths twitch and pulse like flickering streetlights in a dystopian hellscape, colossal distortion from its sonically impressive production rattles your ribcage and choirs of ghostly voices rise in the background like a cathedral burning in real time. This album sounds like it was recorded inside a crumbling city where the only laws are basslines and righteous fury.
Imagine if Trench-era Twenty One Pilots got locked in a haunted underground bunker, Ghost’s best material held a ritual summoning eldritch industrial spirits and Bring Me The Horizon’s POST HUMAN era achieved sentience and overthrew its creators. Then take all of that and feed it through something that was compressed into a data file, corrupted, and broadcast through pirate radio stations during the collapse of modern civilization. It’s dense. Unrelenting. Overwhelming in all the right ways.
The industrial synths don’t just set the atmosphere. Rather, they vibrate through your skull like malfunctioning neon signs flickering in a rainstorm. Guitars don’t just chug along—they slam into you like a subway train at full speed. The percussion is completely unhinged. It doesn’t “keep time”; it threatens it. And just when you think you’ve adapted, Nightfall yanks the floor out from under you. One moment, you’re floating in eerie ambience, then suddenly BOOM; you’re getting sonically thrown through a plate-glass window by a breakdown so heavy it might trigger the next mass extinction event.
Apex4X has never met subtlety on this project. Nightfall has no patience for hand-holding.
This album does not describe a dystopia; it drags you into one and dares you to fight your way out. The lyrics unravel like frantic transmissions from a world on the brink. It’s half desperate warnings, half cryptic battle cries. Censorship, surveillance, societal collapse, rebellion, it’s all here. This album doesn’t just want you to pay attention. It demands it.
Some tracks feel like coded messages meant to evade government censors. Others read like ripped-up manifestos, smuggled out of burning cities. Either way, by the time you’ve listened all the way through, you’re different now. And just when you think it’s over, Nightfall hits you with gut-punch lines that linger in your mind like propaganda posters peeling off a dystopian city wall. Tracks like “The Battle Won”, “Beneath a Bloodstained Sky” and the titular “Nightfall” best exemplify my point, and they are to put it mildly, tracks you’ve got to hear to believe.
This album does not end when the music stops. It stays with you, rattling in your skull long after the final note has faded.
If you just want background music, Nightfall will personally climb through your speakers, slap your phone out of your hand, and scream at you until you start making eye contact with your own reflection again.
But if you’re ready for a bold, immersive, and unapologetically confrontational record that doesn’t just challenge the listener, one that actively tries to radicalize them, then Congratulations.
You’ve found your new favorite album.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
