Released: October 31, 2025

Personnel: 

• Mariusz Duda: bass, piccolo bass, piano and keyboards, acoustic guitar, ukulele, percussion, samples, all vocals
• Wawrzyniec Dramowicz: drums (1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13)
• Marcin Odyniec: saxophone (2, 6, 8)
• Mateusz Owczarek: guitar solo (4), soundscapes (12)

Track List:

1. The World Under Unsun
2. Loop of Fate
3. Good Memories Don’t Want to Die
4. Monsters
5. The Prophecy
6. Mind Obscured, Heart Eclipsed
7. Torn in Two
8. Hands Made of Lead
9. Ardour
10. Game of Life: Part I In the Court of the King of Hearts Part II Escape
11. Confession
12. Parallels
13. Self in Distorted Glass
14. The New End

OMG. 

This album. 

Okay, maybe I should expand on that. It’s a big album, so this will be a big review; we want to do it justice, after all. So get comfy, we’re gonna be here a while. 

The World Under Unsun has come to us five long years after the previous Lunatic Soul release. TWUU marks the end of the project in its current form, eight albums of extraordinary musical vision and whose lyrics, taken together, tell a single story, the journey of an unnamed protagonist through life, death, and return. It is a true double album in the classic sense of the word: at 14 songs and just a shade under 90 minutes, it is the longest album of original music Mariusz Duda has ever created in his career. It’s always a risk to make something this big — are all the songs strong enough to stand up to the length, maintain interest, and not feel like filler? There’s only one way to find out.

When I got the album files, I donned my headphones and, in the dark, with no distractions or interruptions, I listened to it through. I’d heard the first single already; the other two had not yet been released. 

When I finished it … all I knew for sure was that I had just experienced something huge. Immense and sweeping and very dark in mood, it was almost overwhelming. I heard things that were intimately familiar, things Duda had hinted at in earlier albums but taken to the next level, and things I’d never heard him do before. It was only after the fifth or sixth time that I began to understand the scope of what he had created, when everything finally came together. And that is the key to The World Under Unsun — it is an album that demands your time and attention. You’re not going to know it after hearing it a couple or three times. Indeed, at this point I have lost count of how often I’ve played it, and I’m still finding magic in there.  

TWUU is infused with an imposing weightiness rarely heard in Lunatic Soul. Mariusz’s bass is the bedrock (no surprise there), pounding riffs and wonderfully fluid basslines creating the foundation that anchors the album’s mood and atmosphere. And yet despite the overarching darkness, there are delicate piano passages, ballads of indescribable beauty, great sweeping soundscapes, even some electronics. The entire project is built on an ambient and trance backbone, layering complexity over repeated melodic themes, and TWUU may be the epitome of this approach — but not only that. Almost everything we have ever heard in Lunatic Soul is here somewhere. Hints and references to Fractured, Walking on a Flashlight Beam, LS I, and Through Shaded Woods are scattered throughout the album. There are easter eggs galore. 

It’s tempting to go through TWUU track-by-track, and I could — there are no bad songs here, but there are a lot of them. I think I will just hit the highlights. It shouldn’t need to be said that what follows is my opinion, and the songs that resonate with you may easily be different ones.

The album starts out with the title track (and first single), a spare and rather stately piece that acts as a prologue, but in reality does not much sound like what comes after. In fact, the three singles only give the merest hint of what you will hear — TWUU is by no means as sedate as these suggest. There is some insanely great music on this album, and trying to describe even some of what it contains is a thesaurus-destroying exercise. But let’s try. 

“Good Memories Don’t Want to Die” is the first of four ballads scattered through the album, beautiful and slow if a bit conventional, driven by melancholic ukulele and vocals. This is followed by “Monsters,” and I love what Mariusz has done with this song. He’s taken Through Shaded Woods, in particular the title track, and completely subverted it. Menacing and compelling, it marches us through the primeval demon-haunted woods without pause, a sly and adroit revisiting of ideas in that earlier album.

After the gloriously imposing 5th track (and second single) “The Prophecy,” we get to what, for me, is the real core of the album, a massive trifecta of songs right in the middle: two monstrous epics with a ballad between them. These three, plus the penultimate “Self In Distorted Glass,” are as enormously accomplished as anything in Mariusz’s discography, and one of them just might be the best thing he’s ever written — and I don’t mean just for Lunatic Soul. I mean, best, period. At least, at this moment and after countless listens, it feels that way to me. 

The big three starts with “Mind Obscured, Heart Eclipsed,” the longest piece at just over 11 minutes, and as oddly-structured a Lunatic Soul track if ever there was one. It moves from a droning, fluid opening into a jagged piccolo-bass riff under a delicate, orthogonal vocal line, that together set up a disquieting tension that suffuses the entire piece. There is a sax break, then a riff-heavy bass-and-synth section, winding up softly with sax again: trust me, you have to hear it to get it. 

This is followed by the best ballad on the album. The last single released, “The New End,” gets a lot of traction, and as lovely as it is, it has nothing on the touching and evocative “Torn in Two.” This is an astonishing song, a beautifully delicate piano piece that is a poignant observation on the divided state of the world, a heartbreakingly simple plea for unity and love. I think it is the most affecting ballad Mariusz has ever written, and I will die on that hill.  

From there we move straight into “Hands Made of Lead,” the goddamned best song I have heard come out of Mariusz’s head for years, and trust me, I don’t make that claim lightly. Compact, intricate, relentlessly compelling…when I say he’s done things he has never done before, this is the sort of thing I mean. It is essentially an instrumental: after a very dark and strangely formal spoken-word intro it plunges straight into unrelentingly monstrous bass riffage with soaring sax and synths, Dramowicz just whaling away on the drums. This is a masterclass in songwriting, an epic in the best meaning of the word. This track blows my mind every single time I play the album.

It probably comes as no surprise that the album sags some after this behemoth set of tracks. There is nothing wrong with the next four songs — a ballad, some trance, and, well, “Game of Life” — but the bar was set pretty high, and we have to reach nearly the end before we hit one that gets over it, but boy, does it ever. 

“Self in Distorted Glass” is the only song that could possibly compete with “Hands Made of Lead” for Best In Show. This song, more than any other on the album, captures the entire spirit of Lunatic Soul. It stomps into existence and proceeds relentlessly with no letup: martial “Gutter”-like rhythms, hypnotic oriental themes, crazy piccolo-bass riffs, powerful trance, the glorious singing (Mariusz belts like we don’t often get to hear), right up to the sound of the rolling waves (a major Lunatic Soul trope) at the end. It’s a grand summary of the early years of the project, the first four albums rolled into one glorious totality. 

We can’t forget the lyrics. The album’s words tell the story of the protagonist at a point in the narrative when he is forced to face certain realities about his life and relationships, and make certain decisions to preserve his own integrity. TWUU follows Fractured, which is the first album on the Side of Life in the Circle of Life and Death, and it leads into Walking on a Flashlight Beam, the last album on the Side of Life and where “The Prophecy” is fulfilled. The lyrics on TWUU dig deep into the frangible psychology of our hero, and are intense, sobering, and sometimes so deeply infused with pain they are hard to read. As well, Mariusz has stated a few times over the years that lyric-writing is therapeutic for him, and he exorcises a lot of personal demons by doing so. He is not absent from these words. 

The World Under Unsun is the kind of album that doesn’t come along very often. Enormously cinematic, rich in ideas and masterful in execution, it is a remarkable musical achievement, Mariusz Duda at the top of his game. All of Lunatic Soul is in here — folk, ambient, massive epics and heartbreakingly gorgeous melodies — but tackled in fresh and unexpected ways: it’s a Lunatic Soul we’ve not yet encountered. It sustains quality and interest for almost its entire length, and in truth it does not feel anywhere near an hour and a half long. It demands time and attention, but will reward every moment devoted to it. With this project, Duda has created an epic tale the likes of which is unique in the world of prog (the genre he is most closely associated with), but in reality Lunatic Soul defies classification. Perhaps it truly is a genre unto itself.