To call 2.5 Nighttime by Ars Onirica a Melodic Death Metal EP is like calling the ocean “a bit damp.” Sure, there’s melody. Sure, there’s death. But what Alessandro Sforza has crafted here goes far beyond mere genre trappings. This isn’t an EP you simply listen to — it’s one you inhabit. It seeps into your mind like twilight mist, wrapping itself around you until you’re not quite sure whether you’re awake or drifting into some lucid, beautiful nightmare.
Ars Onirica lives in the borderlands between light and shadow, between melody and melancholy, and 2.5 Nighttime perfects that balancing act. Across five tracks, Sforza builds an atmosphere so dense and immersive that you can almost feel the cold air of a dying evening pressing against your skin. It’s part dreamscape, part descent — a passage from dusk to dawn where emotion, melody, and existential dread intertwine like smoke.
The first two pieces lure you in slowly. They’re pensive, meditative — the sonic equivalent of standing at your window, staring out into the fading blue of a dying sun. It’s patient, intimate, cinematic even. And then, just as you’ve begun to lose yourself in the stillness, Nighttime Part II hits — and the transformation is immediate.
Here, Sforza unleashes his inner beast. The Melodic Death Metal elements come roaring to life, full-bodied and full-blooded. Riffs cut through the haze with surgical precision, drums thunder like and oncoming storm, and his vocals — desperate, commanding, drenched in despair — rip through the mix with raw human agony. It’s catharsis in sound, a fever-dream eruption that throws you deep into the chasm the first two tracks only hinted at.
By the time Nighttime Part III takes over, you’re caught between beauty and annihilation. It’s melodic, yes, but the melodies ache. They bleed. They carry weight — the kind of emotional heft that feels carved into the bones of the music itself. Every riff, every chord progression feels deliberate and fated, as if Sforza isn’t just writing songs but mapping the soul’s descent through shadow.
And then, just as suddenly as it began, the EP releases you. The closing moments – Dawn – are fragile, like the faint light of dawn pushing through your curtains after a night of fevered dreams. You’re not sure what’s real anymore, but you know something inside you has shifted.
What makes 2.5 Nighttime such a triumph is its cohesion. It’s not just five tracks — it’s a single, fluid experience that pulls you through a cycle of emotional and sonic transformation. It’s elegant, cinematic, deeply personal, and absolutely fucking haunting. Sforza doesn’t need to bludgeon you with brutality; he just opens a window into his world and lets the shadows do the rest.
2.5 Nighttime EP by Ars Onirica is available October 24th via Ardua Music.
CHOICE CUT: Nighttime Part II
BLACK METAL ARCHIVES VERDICT: More than Melodic Death Metal — this is melancholy made manifest. A fever dream carved in sound, an emotional journey that burns slow but deep.
PRESS SOURCE: Imperative PR.
