DARKSIDE - NOTHING

The darkness isn’t all heavy, it’s fragile. It shatters the moment light touches it. On their 2025 release “Nothing,” The Darkness step fully into that light, pulling us along for a journey that starts with steam and ends in silence. The scene is set with the opening track, “SLAU.” Throbbing tones and steamy eruptions transport the listener to a train platform. Axles pump, steam rises, and we walk through a machine-made cloud, searching for our locomotive, searching for our companion, our car number, hidden in a haze along with any logical reason. We’re leaving everything we thought we knew on the platform before boarding. Halfway through the track, a railway worker’s voice booms across the loudspeaker, providing no guidance, only reinforcing that it’s time to abandon our preconceived notions of travel. We board anyway.

Track two, "S.N.C.," eases us into the carriage. The rhythm regular now, our surroundings settle. The conductor knows us already, sees the weight under our eyes, hears the silence on our lips. “I know that you can’t forget. I know that you’re sleeping less. I know that your clouded thoughts give you no peace or rest, and now you sit and smile and when they ask you how you say, there’s nothing on my mind.” Of course there is, but now it’s time to let it go. Take your seat and look out the window. Not only did you leave your notions on the platform, you left your baggage there too. You never needed it, all that junk would only hold you back. The conductor has given you permission to discard these unnecessary and inhibitory items. You’re free now, to experience yourself unencumbered by thoughts. Any thoughts. All thoughts. Bye.

By the time "Are You Tired (Keep On Singing)" arrives, we’re swaying into the lull of the ride. A balm for the burn we didn’t know we carried. The track hums like a lullaby for the spiritually bruised, reminding us that exhaustion isn’t weakness, it’s a sign we’ve been fighting too long. Here, we can soften. Here, we can keep singing, let the momentum carry us forward.

Building up speed with track four, “Graucha Max,” a voice again booms over the loudspeaker, but it’s indistinguishable, and at this point we are fully accepting of that. The percussion and experimental nature of the song splits at two separate points, once at the beginning as we build into the theme, and again towards the end as we disintegrate out of the melody and strip down to strident noise. We have entered and exited our first tunnel, and the landscape on the other side of this hill, as we venture into track five, “American References,” is a midwestern plain, dusty and full of abandoned industrial equipment, offering the most spectacular crimson, violet, and golden-dipped clouds illuminated by the setting sun.

"Heavy Is Good For This" slows us into nightfall. The world beyond the glass darkens, and so do we, closing our eyes, leaning into meditation. This is where the album reveals its thesis: we weren’t invited here for spectacle or escape. We were brought here to confront what we carry. Or rather, what we don’t.

With minds finally clear, we gain a modicum of perspective. We see that everyone is living this same hell, dragging our cumbersome physical and psychological belongings through time and space, wherever we go. The two-part “Hell Suite,” zooms out for perspective. We glimpse the world outside our carriage, where others still drag their burdens through life, unaware they could simply let go. It’s not judgment, it’s sorrow. They don’t know what it feels like to be free.

And then, the final track: "Sin El Sol No Hay Nada." Did we sleep through the night, or did we never sleep at all? The train slows. Light cracks through the windows. As we rise, the sun once again breaks the darkness. Without it, there is nothing. Striking a balance between being nothing, embracing nothing, and realizing that nothing is everything — in the sense that the pure nature of our existence lies in this state of emptiness — brings us one step closer to understanding reality.

Nothing is the point: to dissolve the ego, to unlearn the performance of self, to arrive stripped of explanation, awake to the strange fact of being. The final crescendo doesn’t fade, it vanishes. No farewell. No fanfare. Just a void. But that void hums, and in it: potential. Not an end, but a fertile beginning.