For much of their career, the Belgian collective Psychonaut has charted grand, introspective courses through time and space. Their music has been a vessel for exploring consciousness, spirituality, and the metaphysical fabric of the universe. With their third full-length album, ‘World Maker,’ however, the band makes a profound and necessary turn from the cosmic to the terrestrial. It is a record created not in philosophical abstraction but in the crucible of life’s most elemental forces: birth and death. The album, scheduled for release on October 24, 2025, via the Berlin-based label Pelagic Records, documents a period of immense personal change for the band, born of what press materials describe as “insurmountable joy and simultaneous profound loss.”
The seed of ‘World Maker’ was planted as the campaign for their previous album concluded, when guitarist and vocalist Stefan De Graef learned he was to become a father. This fundamental shift in perspective began to reshape his creative process, moving away from spiritual theory and toward an endurance of love and life lessons for his unborn son. Yet, this period of hopeful euphoria was soon shadowed by tragedy.
Within a year of his son’s birth, both De Graef and bassist-vocalist Thomas Michiels received the devastating news that their respective fathers had been diagnosed with advanced cancers. This collision of creation and loss became the album’s emotional core.
The title itself, ‘World Maker,’ operates as a powerful dual metaphor, signifying both the literal creation of a new world through the birth of a child and the psychological act of re-making one’s own world in the aftermath of profound grief. It is, in its most distilled form, “a father singing to his newborn son as a son bids his own father farewell.”
Psychonaut: From God Man to ‘World Maker’
The thematic gravity of ‘World Maker’ is made all the more significant by the artistic trajectory that precedes it. Formed in Mechelen, Belgium, in 2013, the trio of De Graef, Michiels, and original drummer Peter Le Page quickly established a sound that drew from the expansive textures of 1970s psychedelic rock and the immense weight of contemporary post-metal.
Their 2018 debut, ‘Unfold The God Man,’ was a formidable statement of intent, but it was its re-release in 2020 by Pelagic Records that sent a “shockwave through the post-metal and prog scenes.” The album, which required three represses to meet demand, cemented their reputation for intricate compositions and deep philosophical narratives centered on consciousness.
This elevation from a respected regional act to a recognized force in the international heavy music community was pivotal. Being signed to the label of genre luminaries The Ocean provided immediate credibility and a global platform, affording the band the artistic security to pursue an even more ambitious vision.
They followed this success with 2022’s ‘Violate Consensus Reality,’ an album that delved deeper into “transformative metaphysical complexities,” hardening their identity as explorers of the abstract. It was during this period that the band’s lineup solidified, with Harm Peters taking over drumming duties in 2020, just as their profile began to rise.
Their formidable live presence was honed on stages across Europe, sharing bills with peers like Amenra, Brutus, and Pelagic Records labelmates The Ocean and PG.Lost. This history of exploring the theoretical and the cosmic makes the raw, emotional immediacy of ‘World Maker’ not merely a change in subject matter, but a courageous and deliberate artistic evolution.
A Searing Panoramic Clarity
The album’s new direction is immediately evident in its pre-release singles, each serving as a document of this emotional and sonic shift. Lead single ‘Endless Currents’ opens with a barrage of intricate, staccato guitar tapping before the storm subsides, giving way to powerful, clean vocals. The song’s themes function with poignant duality, serving as both a benediction for a new life just beginning and a farewell to one nearing its end.
Perhaps the most revealing track is ‘And You Came With Searing Light.’ Musically, it is the album’s most complex piece, a dynamic and labyrinthine composition that would have felt at home on ‘Violate Consensus Reality.’ It was, in fact, the first song written for the new record and was originally intended to be the opening track.
The band’s decision to move it deeper into the album’s sequence is a crucial act of narrative curation. Instead of greeting the listener with familiar technicality, they chose to open with the gentle, reverberating Rhodes organ of the title track, an instrument that immediately establishes a warmer, more vulnerable atmosphere.
This structural reordering prioritizes emotional intimacy over progressive confrontation, consciously guiding the listener into the album’s new, deeply personal space. The song’s central theme of discovering the world with fresh eyes becomes a mantra that speaks with equal power to a newborn child and to a person learning to see the world again through the haze of grief.
The second single, ‘Stargazer,’ is named for the rare and poetic “stargazer position” in which De Graef’s son was born. The track masterfully pairs delicate, folk-inflected guitar passages with the towering, thunderous breakdowns that are a hallmark of the band’s sound. Lyrically, it offers an unexpectedly jubilant perspective on mortality, reframing death not as an end, but as a cathartic release and a soaring, divine transformation.
The accompanying music video, directed by Toon Persyn, further visualizes this journey, but the music itself is a cinematic landscape, capturing the turbulent, beautiful space between hope and sorrow.
‘World Maker’: The Structure of Grief and Hope
As a complete work, ‘World Maker’ is an album of profound depth and feeling, exploring what one review calls the “far emotive reaches” of the band’s sound. This is achieved through a deliberate expansion of their sonic palette, which serves as a richer emotional vocabulary.
The warmth of the Rhodes organ on the title track, the meandering, free-jazz inspired guitar solo that introduces ‘Everything Else is Just The Weather,’ and the earthy, grounding presence of tabla percussion on ‘Origins’ and ‘Stargazer’ are not mere embellishments. These new textures are carefully chosen tools that allow the band to articulate a wider spectrum of human emotion—intimacy, fear, warmth, and hope—than their more monolithic post-metal sound previously allowed.
This communal and personal approach extends to the album’s visual identity. The cover artwork was designed by Sam Coussens, a close friend and member of the fellow Belgian cosmic sludge band Pothamus.
Keeping this crucial element “in the family” reinforces the themes of community and support that were vital to the album’s creation during such a turbulent time. Yet, beneath the album’s hopeful warmth and uncharacteristic optimism, there are darker undercurrents.
Some passages reveal a palpable sense of fear and paranoia, a sonic representation of the anxiety that accompanies both profound grief and the immense responsibility of new fatherhood. The music does not shy away from this shadow, making its moments of catharsis and beauty feel all the more earned and authentic.
A Heritage of Sound and Spirit
Psychonaut’s sound has always been a synthesis, and on ‘World Maker,’ their place within a rich artistic heritage becomes clearer than ever. Their work is firmly rooted in post-metal, a genre that emerged in the 1990s and is characterized by its use of heavy metal instrumentation to explore approaches beyond the genre’s conventions, emphasizing atmosphere, dynamic crescendos, and layered, unconventional song structures. This places them in a tradition that includes pioneers like Neurosis and their own Belgian contemporaries in the celebrated Amenra.1
However, what distinguishes Psychonaut is the profound and explicit influence of 1970s psychedelic and progressive rock. The band has openly cited inspirations such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and the connection is more than stylistic; it is genealogical.
Psychedelic rock’s use of distortion, extended instrumental passages, and exploration of altered states of consciousness were foundational to the development of early heavy metal.2 Psychonaut’s music represents a powerful synthesis of post-metal’s two dominant schools: the raw, hardcore-derived aggression of bands like Neurosis and the more atmospheric, post-rock-indebted melodicism of instrumental acts.
They bridge this divide by infusing their formidable weight with the harmonic and melodic sensibilities of classic psychedelic rock—a connection made touchingly personal by the fact that De Graef named his son David, after Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. This fusion is further contextualized by their origins in the uniquely fertile Belgian heavy music scene, a small but powerful community that, as De Graef has noted, often pushes its artists to overcome a sense of regional self-doubt, resulting in work of exceptional power and ambition.
The World Made Manifest
The artistic vision of ‘World Maker’ is fully realized in its presentation and upcoming live performances. The album consists of ten tracks, presented as a continuous emotional journey: ‘World Maker,’ ‘Endless Currents,’ ‘You Are The Sky,’ ‘Everything Else Is Just The Weather,’ ‘And You Came With Searing Light,’ ‘Origins,’ ‘All In Time,’ ‘Stargazer,’ ‘All Was Quiet,’ and ‘Endless Erosion.’
The album was recorded and produced by the band alongside their longtime collaborator Chiaran Verheyden of the band Hippotraktor and was mastered by the renowned Jens Bogren, ensuring its vast dynamic range is rendered with power and clarity.
Psychonaut will celebrate the album’s release with an initial run of five European shows, beginning in Berlin on October 30 and continuing through Amsterdam, Paris, and London, before culminating in a sold-out hometown performance in Brussels on November 16. The choice of support for the Brussels show, the French experimental quartet BRUIT≤, is a telling curatorial statement.
BRUIT≤ creates deeply conceptual, instrumental music that merges post-rock, modern classical, and ambient electronica, and they are known for their staunchly independent, anti-corporate ethos. Pairing with a band that is sonically distinct yet philosophologically aligned suggests that this tour is conceived as an event centered on artistic depth and emotional resonance, rather than mere stylistic similarity. It reinforces the boundary-pushing spirit of ‘World Maker’ itself, presenting an evening for listeners who value substance and artistry across the spectrum of experimental music.
The Beauty of the Now
With ‘World Maker,’ Psychonaut has turned its gaze inward to create its most expansive and universally resonant work to date. They have shed the grand philosophical narratives of their past, not to simplify their music, but to find a more profound and immediate clarity.
The album is an attestation to the idea that the most enduring truths are often found not in cosmic abstractions but in the deeply personal, terrestrial cycles of life and death. It is the sound of a band maturing in real time, discovering that the act of making and remaking one’s own world in the face of joy and grief is the most powerful gift one can leave for the future.
How has music served as a vessel for processing moments of profound personal change in your own life, and which albums have provided a similar clarity in the face of joy or grief?
References:
- Reid, Austin. ‘A Subjective History of Post-Metal.’ Dead End Follies, July 2, 2025. ↩︎
- Weinstein, Deena. ‘Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture.’ Revised ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Accessed October 29, 2025. ↩︎
Discussion