I was hooked by their 2021 “Imperial” album, every song is a killer that pulled me in, and since then they’ve continued crafting progressive metal that’s both emotionally immersive and intellectually sharp, reflecting inner worlds while exposing the structures that confine them.

And here we are in 2026.

Some albums arrive. “Reliance” was designed.

This is SOEN choosing clarity over clutter, resonance over virtuosity, meaning over mechanics.

Recorded at Fascination Street Studios, the world’s premier facility for metal music, “Reliance” was produced, recorded, and mixed by Alexander Backlund, with mastering by Tony Lindgren, a team known for sonic precision without sterilization.

SOEN is anchored by Joel Ekelöf’s raw, introspective vocals, with Lars Åhlund and Cody Lee Ford layering textured, cinematic guitars, Stefan Stenberg holding the grounding bass, and Martín López driving the heartbeat with precise, dynamic drumming. Across lineup changes, they craft progressive metal that is both emotionally immersive and intellectually sharp, reflecting inner worlds while exposing the structures that confine them.

Conceptually, the album centers on trust, dependence, fracture, and reconstruction. Joel Ekelöf has described it less as a political statement and more as a human one: what happens when the things we rely on, systems, people, beliefs, fail us.

Primal

Immediate, physical, confrontational.

The riff asserts. The chorus feels released, like pressure escaping containment.

This is SOEN announcing the rules: emotion first, complexity second.

“We are confined within our minds, fully deprived / On their kindness we rely / And all they have is what we built with our own hands”

The line exposes a brutal inversion:
We depend on systems that only exist because we made them, yet we experience that dependence as benevolence.

“They passively divide us through technology / Turn us indifferent to atrocity”

This is one of the most accurate lines written about modern life in the last decade, because it understands how power works now.

Not through force. Through passivity.

You don’t have to hate anyone. You just have to stop caring.

Technology doesn’t radicalize most people. It sedates them.

Atrocity becomes content. Suffering becomes something you swipe past on the way to dopamine. The horror isn’t that we’re exposed to everything, it’s that exposure has made us numb.

“You’ll never be someone else / Free the war in yourself”

This is the album’s moral center.

Every system of control depends on one fantasy: that fulfillment exists somewhere outside yourself. Another identity. Another tribe. Another role. Another version of you that finally fits.

SOEN reject that fantasy completely.

Mercenary

As soon as the intro kicked in, I was hooked.

One of the album’s most direct punches.

The song interrogates violence as inheritance, how cycles perpetuate themselves when no one interrupts them. Musically, it’s disciplined and muscular, built for impact rather than indulgence.

Heavy doesn’t mean chaotic. It means focused.

“Fueled by the hatred fed to us since we were born”

This line dismantles the myth of spontaneous anger.

Hatred here isn’t a personal failing, it’s an inherited fuel source. Something introduced early, normalized, ritualized. You’re not angry because you chose to be. You’re angry because it was efficient for someone that you were.

This is how generational hostility survives: not through ideology, but through osmosis. Language, stories, media, memory. No single villain. Just a transmission chain.

“Within our walls divided by the lines we’re drawing”

This is one of those lines that sounds obvious until you sit with it, and then it becomes damning.

The walls are real. The divisions are imaginary.

We draw the lines first, then build the walls to justify them.

And.

“We’re drawing.” Not they. This isn’t oppression imposed; it’s segregation volunteered.

People often ask why unity never arrives. Because division gives identity faster than unity gives meaning.

And make sure you stick around for this part.

“Crowning vultures into kings”

This is the album’s most ruthless metaphor.

Vultures don’t create. They consume what’s already dead.

So when we crown them kings, we’re not being conquered, we’re misidentifying decay as leadership.

Every king needs subjects who believe the crown means something. Every vulture needs a public willing to confuse scavenging with strength.

The throne isn’t proof of worth.
It’s proof of what we tolerated.

This isn’t protest music. It’s an audit.

And audits are terrifying because the numbers don’t lie.

Discordia

This is where “Reliance” reveals its inner life.

Tension breathes here. Space matters. If the album has a quiet center of gravity, this is it.

“I never wanted to be hurt in any way / So I build up a wall around myself”

This is the most honest confession most people never admit.

The wall isn’t built because of trauma. It’s built because of anticipation.

And that’s the tragedy embedded here: the thing meant to prevent harm becomes the very mechanism that guarantees isolation.

“All purpose fades without a hand to hold / Indifference hinders evolving”

Purpose doesn’t collapse because life is hard. It collapses because no one is witnessing the effort.

Growth requires friction, feedback, and presence.

You don’t need applause.

You need contact.

Without it, progress turns inward and eats itself.

“I dare to lose you but not to be whole”

Loss is familiar.

Wholeness is terrifying.

So the choice isn’t between love and pain. It’s between known suffering and unknown integration. And most people choose the former because at least it fits their identity.

And that’s why it resonates. Because at some point, everyone has confused survival with living, and wondered why the room felt so empty.

Axis

Relentless momentum.

“Axis” locks into a groove and refuses to let go. No wasted movement, no ornamental flourishes. The restraint is the point.

It’s a song about alignment, and it practices what it preaches.

And how good is that section after the solo!

“Every time you ask for more / You open up to be shamed and disowned”

It’s about permission, not greed.

Wanting more than you’re allotted is framed as moral failure. Gratitude becomes a leash. Shame becomes the enforcement mechanism.

“But the time is on their side / Red or blue, they’re all the same”

Longevity masquerades as legitimacy. Outrage rotates, faces change, slogans refresh, but the incentives remain intact.

“Break out from indifference and see that ghost isn’t who you are”

Indifference here isn’t laziness. It’s a survival strategy that outlived its usefulness.

You don’t dismantle systems by screaming at them. You weaken them by refusing to vanish inside them.

That’s why Axis matters. It isn’t a rallying cry. It’s a diagnosis of how control actually works, and why the most dangerous act isn’t rebellion, but staying visible when the machine wants you small.

Huntress

Subtle, predatory, patient.

This track doesn’t chase hooks; it stalks them. Melodies linger instead of announce themselves, revealing their weight over time.

One of the album’s most underrated moments.

“A silent moon on the rising… talking to the ghost / claiming every thought I have as their own”

It’s about internalized voices, past expectations, old identities, inherited narratives that keep narrating your life long after they’ve lost relevance. You can see the split, but you can’t escape it yet.

“I don’t need another hero / carrying me on through my life”

The refusal of a hero isn’t about strength, it’s about distrust. If no one carries you, no one can drop you. The line exposes how self-reliance mutates into isolation when it’s built on fear rather than confidence.

“I bind myself to your fortress / feeding on your misery”

A fortress is safety, but it’s also containment. Binding yourself to someone else’s walls means outsourcing your identity to their suffering.

This is the most uncomfortable idea in the song: some bonds survive because they hurt. Pain becomes proof of closeness. Escape would require rebuilding the self from scratch, and that feels harder than staying.

“The more we have the less we hope”

When everything is owned, nothing feels possible. The hunt isn’t for control, or safety, or heroes.

It’s for room to breathe.

And Huntress understands something quietly devastating, sometimes the thing stalking you isn’t danger.

It’s the life you never allowed yourself to live.

Unbound

The emotional peak.

This is where melody and catharsis converge. The guitar solo feels earned, not decorative.

If “Reliance” is about breaking dependence, “Unbound” is the moment of release.

“On fields of fury we’re marching / armed with a sacred disdain”

This isn’t faith as comfort. It’s faith as permission. Once hatred is baptized, it stops feeling like violence and starts feeling like duty.

“We promise you the light / grant us your life and we will rise as one”

It’s not coercion. It’s exchange. Hope for obedience. Meaning for surrender. Belonging for self-erasure. And the brilliance of the line is that it never pretends to be gentle. The cost is explicit.

“No salvation without pain”

Pain becomes proof. Suffering becomes currency. If it hurts, it must be real. If it costs everything, it must be right.

Once pain is framed as necessary, there is no limit. Every escalation is justified retroactively. Every atrocity is merely another step toward divinity.

“Will I ever see the gleaming light? / cursed is our flesh by its mortality”

Doubt creeps in. Mortality intrudes. The body reminds the believer that no amount of faith abolishes decay.

This is the moment every absolutist ideology tries to silence, the realization that transcendence was promised, but never delivered.

The tragedy of “Unbound” is that it understands the longing to be part of something eternal, and the fear that you’ve traded your soul for a story that can’t love you back.

Indifferent

A rupture.

Strings, piano, restraint, this is vulnerability without armor. It’s about absence, detachment, and the quiet devastation of emotional withdrawal.

Heavy doesn’t always distort. Sometimes it just hurts.

“You turned away that day / leaving our past in that place”

The most devastating kind of violence: quiet abandonment.

There’s no explosion, no betrayal scene, no villain monologue. Just a turn. And that’s what makes it lethal. When someone walks away, they take the shared meaning with them. The past doesn’t end, it’s left behind, unresolved, still alive in the one who stayed.

“But memories remain / sunlight fades away”

Memory isn’t warm here. It’s gravitational. The light doesn’t disappear all at once, it fades. Slowly. Quietly. Almost politely.

So you linger. Not because you want to, but because memory refuses to release you.

“But nothing feels as good as you”

The body remembers connection even when the mind knows it’s over. And that creates the cruelest loop of all: longing that no longer has an address.

“How does someone become so cold and indifferent?”

It’s a question without an answer.

This song understands the most brutal truth of loss: The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s being dismissed.

Drifter

Motion without destination.

There’s a sense of movement here that never resolves, mirroring the theme itself.

“I learned that struggle will thicken your skin / for the violence coming”

Thick skin is survival currency. It keeps you standing. But it also numbs sensation. What starts as protection quietly becomes desensitization. You don’t just block pain, you block signal.

“I hear the hatred in your voice… the poison of your thoughts leaking out / right into us”

Hatred doesn’t stay contained. It seeps.

This is how communities rot without noticing. Anger normalized. Suspicion rewarded. Cruelty reframed as strength.

“Don’t let them push you around… now’s the time to deny to be prey / to call upon revenge”

The language of empowerment slides into the logic of domination. Revenge is framed as self-respect. Prey becomes predator. And suddenly the chains you’re breaking look suspiciously like the ones you’re forging.

“Drifter” understands something brutally modern: the hardest thing isn’t standing up to pressure, it’s knowing when resistance stops being protection and starts becoming poison.

Draconian

Weight returns.

This track carries consequence. The riffs are heavier, the mood darker, the questions sharper. It feels like the reckoning before resolution.

No false optimism. Just gravity.

“I see the eyes of a god”

The god here doesn’t arrive with thunder or truth. It appears only when the speaker is broken. That’s the tell.

This isn’t faith discovered.

It’s faith summoned.

And that makes it dangerous, because whatever answers your pain fastest gets to name itself sacred.

“Father, don’t cast me out / I need to be forgiven”

Forgiveness isn’t about wrongdoing here. It’s about belonging. The fear isn’t punishment, it’s exile.

You don’t submit because you’re convinced, you submit because the alternative is isolation.

That’s how authority survives long after it stops being humane.

“Kneeling to wash my sins / cutting into my skin, your will commands my actions”

Pain becomes compliance. The body becomes proof.

This is the most draconian logic imaginable: if it hurts, it must be working. If it doesn’t, you haven’t gone far enough.

Vellichor

A closing meditation.

Atmospheric, expansive, and quietly powerful. The title, nostalgia for places you’ve never been, is the perfect final note.

“Touch the hopeless with the words you say / save the last embrace for the loved ones”

Words matter, but so does scarcity. Not every connection needs to be public. Not every gesture needs an audience.

“Speaking clearly is the tongue of hope / words that will dissolve our cover”

Covers protect us, but they also isolate us. Clarity removes camouflage. It doesn’t guarantee safety, it guarantees contact. To speak clearly is to risk being seen without armor.

“In the dark we are all the same / in the light we can only be us / but the shade reflects who we are”

Darkness equalizes. Fear flattens. Under threat, everyone becomes a silhouette. Identity compresses into survival.

Light, paradoxically, doesn’t unify, it individuates. You don’t get to be everything. You only get to be yourself.

And the shade, the in-between, is where character shows up. Shade is where we make choices without scripts.

That’s vellichor: nostalgia for something you can’t return to, but also can’t forget. A feeling of familiarity without possession.

And that’s the most generous thing “Reliance” does: It doesn’t tell you who to be. It hands you a mirror, and steps away.

The album doesn’t end. It echoes.

“Reliance” isn’t trying to out-prog the genre.

It’s trying to out-connect it.

Some fans will miss the labyrinthine structures of earlier records. Others will recognize this as SOEN refining their voice instead of amplifying it.

This album trusts the listener. And in return, it asks you to trust it.