Formed in 2006, The Kiss That Took A Trip is the brainchild of M.D. Trello, the sole member and admitted factotum of the project. Thirty In Twenty is designed not just as a celebratory retrospective, but as a roadmap illustrating how the project’s music has mutated over the years—evolving from highly experimental, instrumental ambient post-rock into streamlined, electronica-tingled alternative pop/rock.

The double album features the absolute best of the project’s output, alongside exciting new additions:

• 3 Brand New Tracks: “We are what we protect,” “Forevermore,” and “Mimosa.”

• 2 Complete Reworkings: “Three girls” and “Vanilla killer.”

• 2 Remixed Tunes: “Amplification of the senses” and “Stock footage.”

• 23 Remastered Fan Favorites: Including the quirky, highly acclaimed cover of Q Lazzarus’s “Goodbye horses.”

The album’s rollout was spearheaded by the nostalgic piano ballad “We are what we protect,” followed by the official lead single and accompanying video for “Forevermore,” which launched on March 18th.

Operating entirely outside the conventional music industry, The Kiss That Took A Trip maintains a strict and unapologetic rulebook: completely independent, computer-based production (while vehemently rejecting the “electronic music” tag), zero live performances, and a commitment to Creative Commons, free-of-charge digital music. Trello champions a “pay only if you wish” model, prioritizing a consistent, lasting music catalog with high replay value over quick consumption. Furthermore, amidst the advent of AI, the project strictly spells out its stance in favor of human-crafted artistry.

“In an era obsessed with instant hooks and tidy playlists, The Kiss That Took A Trip remains a glorious anomaly.” — Chris Bound, Horror Vacui Review

Blending melody, atmosphere, drone, and dissonance, Trello’s signature sound will appeal to fans of The Church, Cibo Matto, Blonde Redhead, Depeche Mode, Mogwai, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

⇒ Have you missed our album review? Check here.

A Striking Architecture of Power and Restraint

Climax moves fluidly across diverse sonic territories, traversing heavy rock, hard rock, blues rock, ambient, and cinematic soundscapes. The record intentionally highlights structural contrast and pacing rather than overplayed flash. The album opens with “The Dragon,” a muscular guitar anthem driven by massive grooves and crashing drums that instantly commands attention. To celebrate the launch, an official cinematic music video for “The Dragon” has been released simultaneously alongside the album.

The heavier, riff-driven force of tracks like “The Dragon” and “Dawn of Fire” stands in beautiful relief against introspective, atmospheric pieces such as “Minutes Away” and “Enter the Mist”. In these spaces, delicate guitar leads, soft piano chords, and ambient synths take center stage, proving that space and melodic restraint can communicate profound human feeling without saying a single word.

Preserving Raw Humanity Over Studio Perfection

What truly sets Decadent Heroes apart in the modern music landscape is a meticulous production philosophy that prioritizes raw, honest human performance over digital correction. Recorded primarily in his home studio in Pescara, Italy, Chiappini spent months perfecting his Helix HX Stomp presets before tracking. Because the guitar tones arrived at the mixing stage close to final, he was able to focus entirely on feel during recording, keeping first and second takes complete with their spontaneous, organic imperfections.

To bring this expansive musical vision to life, Chiappini assembled an elite roster of international session musicians to form a living, breathing rhythm section. The album features world-class performances by legendary drummer Dennis Holt (Kansas, Taylor Swift), bassist Fausto Berardo, and additional standalone contributions from Pino Saracini (Eros Ramazzotti), Rich Gray (Annihilator), Marcin Palider, Darrell Nutt, and Francesco Coppola Bove.

An Artist’s Culmination

“In many ways, this album is the culmination of everything I’ve learned as a guitarist and producer up to this point,” notes Luigi Chiappini. “It’s the first time I feel I’ve been truly honest with myself in the studio. What makes it stand out is the balance between raw power and emotional depth. It’s not just another instrumental guitar album; it feels like a real journey with dynamics, contrast, and storytelling.”

The record starts with “The Dragon,” a guitar anthem with a driving hard rock beat that is surprisingly melody-centric rather than riff-centric, as the initial impression would imply. The riff is the hook that pulls you in, but Chiappini quickly reveals that the real architecture of the song is built around the lead guitar voice singing above it. The track has a cinematic weight to it, the kind that instrumental rock only achieves when the composer trusts melody over flash, and the performances from Holt and the rhythm section give it a foundation that feels genuinely massive without sacrificing groove. Chiappini describes it as a meteor crashing into the earth, and that’s not an overstatement: it announces the album’s intentions immediately and without apology.

It’s not all intensity, though, because a guitar-forward album like this wouldn’t be complete without some introspective ballads, and “Minutes Away” is a great example of one. The Andy Timmons inspiration is very clear here, particularly in the sustain and the way the phrasing lingers on single notes, letting them breathe and decay rather than rushing to the next idea. Timmons’ “Deliver Us” is the closest reference point for what Chiappini is chasing sonically, that combination of emotional weight and tonal warmth that makes a guitar line feel like a voice rather than an instrument. “Minutes Away” achieves that. The layered atmospherics give it an immersive quality, and the dynamic contrast with the heavier tracks around it makes the whole album feel more considered as a sequenced experience.

“Hype” remains the standout for me personally. The melody is locked in rhythmically in a way that makes it easily singable, which is the rarest quality in instrumental guitar music and the one that separates the genuinely great tracks in the genre from the technically impressive ones. It sits comfortably alongside the best moments of Joe Satriani’s catalog, not because it’s imitative, but because it achieves the same thing Satriani at his best achieves: a melody so strong and so well-phrased that you don’t notice you’re not hearing words. Chiappini cycles through different scales across the track, Dorian, Phrygian dominant, natural minor, pentatonic, and each shift changes the emotional color without disrupting the momentum. The guitar tone is simultaneously punchy and warm, never fatiguing, and every section earns its place in the structure.

Climax lives up to its title in the best possible sense. It’s not the loudest or most technically overwhelming point, but the point where everything converges: tone, composition, emotion, and dynamics all arriving together in a single coherent vision. For fans of instrumental guitar music, this is exactly what the genre is capable of when a guitarist stops chasing validation and starts chasing truth.

The track is not built as a political declaration, despite the themes it touches upon. Instead, Villani approaches identity, belonging, and social pressure from a deeply personal perspective. The song feels less concerned with proving a point and more interested in capturing a feeling, that subtle but persistent sense that something no longer sits quite where it used to.

Throughout the track, emotional honesty becomes its strongest element. Rather than offering solutions or choosing sides, Villani leaves space for reflection. Questions surrounding survival, modern pressures, and shifting realities remain open, allowing listeners to enter the experience through their own interpretations.

Who Do You Belong to Now? (Great Southern Land) draws from alternative rock foundations while incorporating dark wave atmospheres, industrial textures, emo undertones, and experimental elements. Layers of distortion and uneasy sonic details create a restless landscape that mirrors the emotional weight carried by the lyrics.

Equally compelling is the balance within the production itself. The harsher industrial edges bring tension, while softer atmospheric moments preserve the vulnerability at the song’s centre. Experimental choices never feel excessive; instead, they deepen the emotional atmosphere and strengthen the track’s sense of intimacy.

In a musical climate often driven by certainty and loud declarations, this release takes a different path. Who Do You Belong to Now? (Great Southern Land) chooses introspection over conclusions. Paul Louis Villani offers a thoughtful exploration of identity and unease, crafting a release that lingers through mood, tension, and emotional openness..

What makes “Crowded Silence” intriguing is that Social Treble understands dystopia not as spectacle, but as procedure. The horror here is contractual. Hidden inside the Token Activation Contract is a forgotten clause permitting voluntary decommissioning if a token can remain cognitively and biometrically invisible to the surveillance mesh for almost 229 seconds. The system wrote the clause. The system forgot the clause. He found it anyway. “He reads it more carefully than the system reads him, and the reading is the exit.” That sentence becomes the emotional thesis of the entire project: resistance not through violence, but through interpretation.

“Crowded Silence” refuses conventional structure entirely. No chorus, no verses, no lyrical hooks begging for replay value. Instead, the track unfolds as a six-act cinematic sequence moving through “Boot Sequence,” “Algorithmic Colonization,” “Structural Collapse,” and “Reabsorption Failure” with unnerving precision. The composition behaves like an escape protocol unfolding in real time. Industrial textures grind against ambient post-rock atmospheres while electronic pulses flicker like malfunctioning telemetry signals. The influence of Nine Inch Nails is present in the mechanical density, while echoes of Steven Wilson and Vangelis emerge through the track’s patient, cinematic architecture. Yet the result never feels derivative. Social Treble calls it “cyber-prog,” and honestly, that description fits perfectly: less a genre than a psychological environment.

The binaural production is where the experience fully mutates into something immersive and strangely physical. “ON HEADPHONES, OR NOT AT ALL” is not marketing language here; it is an instruction. Dragonfly drones circle the listener’s skull. Metallic reverbs stretch behind your shoulders. Waves from the brass tuning fork move through the listening field rather than merely across it. Through headphones, “Crowded Silence” stops sounding like a song and starts behaving like a monitored space. You are not observing the surveillance system anymore. You are standing inside it.

The visual component deepens the paranoia beautifully. The glitched subtitles, collapsing holograms, fragmented rendering artifacts, and unstable dragonflies are framed not as stylistic flourishes but as evidence of system failure. The SOMA Network can no longer render AS-1133 correctly because it can no longer read him. One of the strongest moments arrives during the “Compliance Court” sequence when synthetic architectural walls peel away to reveal a real park beneath the simulation, as though reality itself had been buried underneath endless layers of optimization. “What the system could not see, you are now seeing.” It is both a narrative reveal and a philosophical one.

There is also something quietly radical about how transparent this entire release is. Social Treble openly discloses every tool used in the creation process: MIDI guitar, virtual instruments, AI-generated visuals, DAWs, editing software; stripping away the illusion of technological mysticism. The project never pretends the machines created themselves. The systems are part of the medium, but the emotional architecture remains primarily human; and perhaps that is what gives “Crowded Silence” its emotional weight beneath all the cybernetic aesthetics: this is ultimately a story about reclaiming unreadability in a world obsessed with quantifying every fragment of existence.

“Crowded Silence” by Social Treble leaves behind more than an immersive audio experiment or a dystopian concept piece. The track becomes an argument for opacity itself. For the right to remain partially unknowable in systems designed to monetize total visibility. If “Skyline Motherboard… The Burden of Being Known” was the diagnosis, then “Crowded Silence” truly feels like the escape protocol: 229 seconds of disappearing from the grid without ever needing to run..

Straightforwardly, this is an ambient cinematic soundtrack more than it is a rock or prog track despite the genre tags. It opens with a deceptively calm piano, gentle enough to put your guard down, before an electric guitar trails in like a warning underneath it. From there, the track doesn’t move through key changes or time signature shifts the way traditional prog does – instead, it works through texture and pressure, tightening the sonic space around you gradually until it breaks open at the 3:28 mark. The 3D binaural mix is the real instrument here, creating a claustrophobic weight that surrounds rather than just hits. It is purposeful sound design as much as it is composition, and the two are inseparable.

Social Treble describes the project as “Cyber-Prog,” and it’s an accurate enough label. The Nine Inch Nails industrial influence is in the density, the Steven Wilson influence is in the patience. For the headphones-on, world-off listener this was made for, it delivers exactly what it promises.

The song has a 10-minute runtime, which can be quite intimidating for outsiders in such genres, but it’s pretty standard practice for any enthusiast of a post-rock derivative genre, as these songs usually traverse vast auditory landscapes to stimulate the mind as it wanders off to various modes of interiority. So by design it is vague and provides ample space for interpretation and adaptation to one’s own narrative, and every person’s experience with the song will be their own and might even be contradictory to the artist’s original intent or vision for the song, but therein lies the beauty of the human experience. Your experience shapes your reality, and it will shape your perception of this auditory journey.

However, the fact that your experience with it will be unique doesn’t mean it won’t share any commonalities with other people’s experiences, because we have common understandings and ideas about the textures used in the song. The song leans on the orchestral style of arrangement for most of its runtime, but those long, stretched out string sounds are accompanied by the occasional thumping of heavy industrial drum sounds, which gives it a flavor of surrealism.

Cracksinthereal’s building a world where sound design, abstraction, and emotional unease are the primary language. “Dagaz” is immersive and uncompromising, inviting listeners into a shadowed space where structure dissolves into sensation.

The chorus drops words entirely and goes for stacked vocal harmonies instead, using them as a release point. The song was recorded at Trackmix Studios in Ireland, with Elvis on guitars, vocals, and bass, joined by Connor Middleton on drums. Stone Sea blends heavy, hypnotic grooves with melodic elements and hints of world music, creating a sound where heaviness and melody share space. “Left to Be” is a step toward their upcoming album “Ad Astra”.

I was already on board with this song when it started like a Pearl Jam song with that grungy riff and those vocal harmonies but almost halfway through, the atmosphere shifts and a clean section with some really creative drumming that creates an otherworldly feel. It goes hand in hand with the theme that the song discusses, which is the idea of watching different versions of yourself fade across the water. Another big shift comes after that section into a huge sounding guitar solo with harmonic movements like a progressive metal song. This is definitely one of the most texturally diverse rock songs I’ve heard in a while.

Stone Sea‘s moving toward Ad Astra with a clear sense of what they’re after. “Left to Be” shows they’re not interested in sticking to one lane within the grunge and alternative rock framework. The production gives each section room to breathe, and the shifts between heavy and clean don’t feel forced. For a band that’s crossed continents to get where they are now, this track shows they’ve got something distinct going.

The song begins with understated acoustic warmth, a kind of low, amber glow that frames Matt Smith’s voice in intimacy. When he sings “The angels are falling apart / impossible to witness / the art of statesmanship,” the image lands with a quiet ache: fragile, resigned, yet strangely beautiful. His delivery is deliberate, almost contemplative, as if he’s tracing the edges of a memory that still hums with meaning.

Rob Lewis shapes the sonic world with patient precision. Rather than swelling early, the arrangement stretches in slow breaths: acoustic threads, softened synths, muted percussion. Guild Theory let the track grow organically, and by the time the pastoral refrain returns, “We gather our bundles of hay / we’ll survive come what may,” it feels less like a chorus and more like an affirmation whispered against the wind.

Nature becomes the song’s emotional compass. The most luminous moments emerge when Smith turns to the trees and asks, almost gently, “Do you listen to the birds in the trees? / they sing to me, give me release.” That line, paired with the repeated promise “I’ll sing back to them,” becomes the heart of the track: a quiet exchange between human fragility and the world’s enduring calm.

“The Statesman” doesn’t chase drama; it trusts subtlety. In these fields, where angels fall softly, where hay gathers in careful hands, where birds offer release; Guild Theory shape an alt-folk meditation, one that truly resonates with subtlety..