Some albums are purely fascinating, making you question what you just heard. I don’t mean it’s weird or odd, but that it’s more of a sonic experience than a collection of songs. Deposed King released something like that with their debut, and now their sophomore album leans even more into that style. It’s called Letters to a Distant Past, and it releases on November 7th.
Deposed King come to us from Budapest, Hungary. They are a duo, namely Daniel Kriffel and Dominique Király. As far as I can tell, they play all the instruments. Their 2023 debut One Man’s Grief was a sheer surprise, fully of amazing melodies and instrumental portions and variety.
Their style is somewhat reserved. One could say that they hear Riverside and Porcupine Tree in their sound, and that would be true, but the band offers far more than that. They have an exquisite sense of melody, and the vocals are velvety smooth though, ironically, they only appear on a few tracks. No, most of the album is dedicated to textures and layers, some in prog rock fashion, and others in electronica or abstraction.
The album plays like a journey with vocals filtering into the mist here and there before disappearing as elegantly as they arrived. With eleven tracks, the record is serious about the experience it offers, and it’s definitely not the kind you’d discuss track-by-track. All of the tracks deserve to be heard in one sitting, a unified whole.
You’ll notice that they released a couple singles, “Reverie” and “Daymare”. These both have vocals. They are gentle and beautiful songs, both of them supremely enjoyable. I would mention that “Reverie” is about 13 minutes long, so the single is a radio edit; it contains some truly spellbinding guitar work and a lengthy synth solo in the second half that I absolutely love.
The rest of the album is like a trance of different emotions and layers. From the eerie strings of “Stillness” to the bluesy tranquility of “Moonlight Lullaby”, from the rocking heartbeat of the title track to the peaceful ambient piano of “Remnants of Rain”, and from the cautious vocals of “Hope_Regret” to the ambient texture of “Dream/Awake”, the album visits delicious harmonies and never gets dull.
The final three tracks are a particularly potent section. Starting with the eleven-minute instrumental “Corridors of Fog” with its heavier edge and grit, proceeding with “Ashes Drift Apart” with its cinematic and electronic vista drifting into the final vocals on the record, and onto the closer “The Snow” with its purely ambient emotions, the album begins and ends quite similarly, and the haunting trip in the middle will leave you wanting to start it again.
Look, Deposed King have given us another amazing album. I was afraid initially that they’d try to lean into prog cliches just to gain footing in the community, but this album is just as mysterious and gorgeous as the debut with every bit of the character that made it special. Give this a try and float away.
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Find Deposed King online:
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The PROG Mind 