Today, German deathrock/post-punk unit Rope Sect released its second album, Estrangement, via Iron Bonehead Productions.

Since its humble debut in 2017 with the Personae Ingratae EP, Rope Sect has quietly built a formidable canon of work ever since, punctuated by its massively hailed The Great Flood debut album in 2020 and further enhanced by the stop-gap mini-album Proskynesis in 2022.

Following the more electronic textures found on Proskynesis, Rope Sect returns to refine its sound further with Estrangement. A full-length work comprising eight songs in 43 minutes is suitably structured for maximum immersion: twilit in every respect,  each song stretches out to generous lengths, revealing a staggering sense of space that's sensual and suffocating in equal measure. Indeed, Rope Sect returns to those fertile fields of haunting introversion found on The Great Flood and plough them with just the subtlest hint of sparkle without losing its unapologetically lo-fi approach; credit those clarified-but-not-too-much sonics to the mastering by Mario Dahmen at  Liquid Aether Audio. As such, Estrangement feels comforting for its familiarity, but its secrets likewise plunge deeper into the human experience, hushed yet portentous for its quiet magnitude.

As always, Rope Sect underpins that sonic portent with thematic lyrics. Estrangement vaguely is a kind of mental prequel to Personae Ingratae story-wise,  exploring the thought of why people (would) feel estranged and seclude themselves from society and form their sect.

"It can be seen as a  reflection of all the ruins we are surrounded by", states the band, "the  increasing reign of pessimism over optimism in a world that seems to  have doomed itself as well as expressing a sense of not belonging and  the connected urge to escape all this and live by your own rules in your  own little world, passing all the warning signs of human kind going  astray". The album fittingly/dramatically concludes with the pulsing resignation of "Rope Of The Mundane Love", featuring guest vocals by King Dude.

As singular as ever and walking its path with paradoxically ever-more-fervent steps, Rope Sect paint a poignant picture of Estrangement. Link