Esox Lucifer

Released on August 7, 2026 through Ripple Music, Esox Lucifer is the fourth album in five years from 10,000 Years, the stoner-metal trio from Västerås, Sweden. Produced by the band, the eight-track record develops the group’s established affection for dense fuzz, mammoth riffs, and sci-fi imagery while broadening its palette with progressive structures, psychedelic passages, and flashes of thrash-like aggression. Its songs create a surreal world of alien landscapes, occult imagery, paranoia, and mythic beasts, but the album’s defining quality is its forward motion: it treats heavy rock as something kinetic, colorful, and melodically charged rather than merely slow or oppressive.

The brief instrumental “Beasts of the Northern Wild” opens with eerie animal-like effects and spacey guitar before launching into the driving “Pursuit Special,” where thick, Queens of the Stone Age–like riffing meets a direct rock ’n’ roll pulse. “Fleur de Sledgehammer” balances weighty chords with melodic leads and a French spoken-word outro, while “Church of the Red Museum” and “Alien Tactics” push toward cosmic, mid-tempo thrash and more progressive arrangement changes. The single “Two Million Stones” sustains the record’s muscular, chugging momentum, “Paranoidium” converts anxiety into a tense, heavy groove, and the seven-minute title track closes with blackened intensity that eventually gives way to a more psychedelic, expansive finale. Esox Lucifer is therefore a hard-hitting stoner-metal album with enough dynamic contrast and melodic imagination to reach beyond genre routine.