85/100 across six reviews: on paper, DREAMCRUSH is one of 2026’s metallic peaks. And not by a hair — New Noise pulls the 100, Sputnikmusic the 96, Metal Hammer and Distorted Sound the 90. At that level it’s no longer a good record but a near-landslide. Except two voices break the unison: Angry Metal Guy (70) and above all Kerrang! (60). And the public, at 73/100 across 600-plus votes, leans clearly toward the sceptics. Welcome to the year’s widest split.
Blackgaze pushed to white heat
MØL, for context, is Denmark’s spearhead of a genre that’s been surging for a decade: blackgaze, that improbable alloy of glacial black metal and weightless shoegaze. On DREAMCRUSH, the quintet pushes the dial both ways at once — the blasts are sharper, the washes vaster, the melodies more frontal. What the enthusiastic press hails is exactly that ambition: Sputnikmusic hears a band « at the peak of its craft », Metal Hammer a record « of crushing beauty ». On Nuclear Blast, the album has the means for its dreams of grandeur.
The fault line
Crushing beauty crushes, though. The complaint from Angry Metal Guy and Kerrang! turns on the same axis: by maximising everything, the album ends up smoothing its own edges, trading black metal’s bite for a near-stadium grandeur. The public, often more attached to the genre’s original roughness, seems to agree — 73/100 is twelve points below the press. A classic blackgaze debate: how far can you polish darkness before it becomes merely… pretty?
Verdict: 8. We come down on the side of ambition. DREAMCRUSH may not be MØL’s most dangerous record, but it’s their vastest, their most fully realised in production, and at moments their most devastating. That the most demanding half of the audience prefers something more abrasive is a fair debate — not a reason to snub one of the year’s great aesthetic achievements.
