Liminal Sky - All Tomorrow's Darkness - Ltd 2LP

Liminal Sky is the meeting point of two musicians searching for a way out of the darkness. Jaime Gomez Arellano and Daniel Knight, who previously played together in the band Messenger (UK), channel sadness and loss into a shared musical language. The borderland between despondency and tear-stained hope has a name: Liminal Sky.

All Tomorrow’s Darkness is a 56-minute post-rock journey recorded in the rural stillness of Orgone Studios in the English countryside. A stark honesty and sense of emotional weather permeates every corner of the album. Shaped through long nights of insomnia, drinking to numb sorrows, and the haunted quiet of pandemic-era desolation, the record occupies a suspended state where hope only flickers in brief, passing moments. Working in isolation, Gomez and Knight tracked the core of the album themselves; the fields outside their windows and the weight of unchanging grey skies seeped into the songs like another instrument. All Tomorrow’s Darkness is a landscape you inhabit.

Progressive, widescreen guitars chime out, stark yet luminous, barren yet revealing, as Liminal Sky layers each song toward a reverberating crescendo. The instrumentation is seamlessly eclectic, spirited by a constellation of guest musicians and voices. Mat McNerney’s vocals and lyrics on six of the album’s nine tracks form its backbone. Crafting lyrics and vocal arrangements with Gomez and Knight in Finland, McNerney’s words articulate the album’s terrain. Having recently lost his mother, he brought profound personal resonance, with songs like In Some Secret Universe and Algebra of Unknowing expanding the album’s honesty and depth.

Other voices move through All Tomorrow’s Darkness like spectral presences: Kristoffer Rygg (Ulver) brings a fragile, shimmering intensity to two tracks, while Karin Park (Årabrot) adds raw emotional gravity to “Penance,” and Daniel O’Sullivan (Ulver, Æthenor, Grumbling Fur, Årabrot collaborator) provides a haunting vocal invocation on the title track. Around them, instrumental colours bloom with Lars Horntveth (Jaga Jazzist, The National Bank) threading saxophone, synths and lap steel; Alicia Nurho adding pale, trembling strings; Anders Møller (Kåre & The Cavemen / Euroboys, Ulver live) deepening the rhythmic pulse; Tore Ylwizaker (Ulver), in one of his last recorded performances, contributing a ghostly piano refrain; Ole Alexander Halstensgård (Ulver) shadowing the soundscape with dissolving textures; and Matt Rozeik (Necro Deathmort) adding subtle, smouldering synth tones. Every collaborator adds texture without altering direction, held together by Gomez’s careful production and cohesive sonic identity.

The album’s title speaks to darkness and discovery in equal measure. For Gomez, “darkness” reflects years lived under persistent clinical depression, but also the strange, cold beauty that emerges when life is stripped back to its basic truth. Tracks such as “Penance,” the first piece he completed, embody this duality with painful clarity. Others, like “Some Other Time,” written in the aftermath of personal losses—Gomez’s family member to Covid, McNerney’s mother to dementia—carry their weight with heartbreaking simplicity, making it a natural choice for the first single.

Despite its collaborative depth, All Tomorrow’s Darkness remains fiercely personal. Gomez admits he never reached a point where the music felt separate from him:

“Every sound still feels connected to a difficult chapter in my life. Completing the record took five years and became an act of closure marking the end of my time in the UK and the beginning of a new creative horizon.”

Visually, the album mirrors its sound with striking fidelity. The cover photograph, taken by Gomez in a desolate Swedish landscape while listening to the early demos, became an instant extension of the music’s inner world: cold, grey, abandoned, yet illuminated by the faintest sense of life. Layout and design by Chalo Rpo complete the aesthetic, while promo images by Simon Kallas capture the project in its raw, unadorned form.

Released worldwide by Karisma Records, All Tomorrow’s Darkness introduces Liminal Sky as music of fearless vulnerability, melancholic post-rock scraped to the bone, grief and beauty without resolution. For fans of Messenger (UK), Jeff Buckley, Ulver, The Mars Volta, Anathema, Radiohead, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sigur Rós, and Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden.

All Tomorrow’s Darkness marks a final chapter in a long, difficult period for its creators and the opening of a new path for Liminal Sky. Gomez has already begun writing the next album. Whether out of necessity or instinct, the world of Liminal Sky continues to expand, bleakly, beautifully, lit by the faint glow that appears when all other lights have gone out.

TRACKLIST:

1. Some Other Time
2. A Solitary Future
3. In Some Secret Universe
4. Forget Me Not
5. Penance
6. The Weight of Heaven
7. Algebra of Unknowing
8. Oar on the Mooring
9. All Tomorrow's Darkness