Debut albums often arrive carrying the weight of both a promise and a gamble. With Reflections, Cairo’s Anemoya steps directly into that tension, shaping a record that feels less like a collection of songs and more like a journey through identity: personal, cultural, and fractured. The band’s progressive metal canvas is wide enough to hold crushing riffs, gothic atmospheres, and cinematic swells, yet intimate enough to let every lyric feel like a whisper meant for the self.
The opener Alexandria is wordless but not voiceless, a sweeping instrumental that establishes origin as both anchor and burden. From there, Pathological Liar tears the mask off denial, Akram Soliman’s vocals weaving between fury and vulnerability. Cold Feet follows with an elegiac tone, a lament for friendship and for the selves we leave behind when fear wins.
At the heart of the album lies Phantom Pain, where Ibrahim Khodeir’s orchestration makes absence palpable, every swell of strings pressing into memory’s wound. Its companion piece, Reflections, co-written with Khodeir, sharpens the mirror theme of the record: a wrestling match with doppelgängers, blurred identities, and the yearning to reconcile what stares back from the glass.
From there, time itself becomes antagonist in The Curse of Time, while The Orientalist turns the lens outward, dismantling distorted narratives imposed by colonial eyes. The spoken word piece Cairo reimagines the city as a living metaphor: ancient, restless, and multiple.
The closing duo, Echo Chambers and Polarized, drive the record into its most urgent terrain. False narratives grow louder until they suffocate, and nuance is swallowed by absolutes. The riffs cut deep, the atmosphere swells, and the curtain falls on a plea for escape from binaries.
What makes Reflections striking is not just the skill of its execution, the precision of Yassin Bahgat’s drumming, the layered guitars of Kareem El Sharabasy and Khaled El Nahas, the bass weight of Moustafa Nazir, but the emotional clarity threading it all together. Anemoya has created an album haunted by history, both personal and collective, yet never resigned to it..
