Messier 16 have released Mollusk Herald, and its virtue on a record full of long pieces is that it is not one. The single comes from Shouts from the Cliffs of Heterodoxy, the Oslo band's third full-length, out on 23 October through Time To Kill Records.
What the band do with the space they take is shift perspective without losing the thread: progressive writing that keeps running into darker and more atmospheric passages, and turns that arrive from somewhere other than where the song was pointing. Mollusk Herald keeps all of that in a shorter frame, which is a harder thing to do than it sounds and a better advertisement for the album than another ten minute piece would be.
It follows Time-Swayed Cities, the first song out from the record. The band formed in 2017 and have put out two albums before this one, Iota in 2021 and Death Poems in 2023.