The Spain-hailing duo, trajedesaliva, return with a beautiful album, that displays their ability to trick us into believing we’re having a pleasant dream, only to realize it was all a nightmare upon waking up.

Just look at the album cover. At first glance, we can see a family portrait which may give us a sense of wholesomeness. One parent is kissing their offspring’s head, while the other grabs her/him by the arm. But, the more we stare at it, that feeling quickly turns into unease. The faces looking back at us are deformed and blurry; that gesture that we may have mistaken for a kiss, looks more like regurgitation or devourment taking place. It is expressionism at its most grotesque: It is unclear if what those characters are expressing is guilt, sorrow, or just plain indifference, but one can’t help but keep looking. And, alas, that is exactly how this album sounds and feels like.

Trajedesaliva, the Spain-hailing experimental and eclectic duo that has been active since the end of the 90s, are back after almost 15 years of absence. Their last work, a split with their fellow countrymen Chaos Condensed, inadvertently left the door open for a more abrasive sound and textural explorations, that differed from the darkwave, electronica-tinged sound trajedesaliva were known for upon starting the project. The result of all these years of apparent inactivity is a beautiful album, that displays the duo’s ability to trick us into believing we’re having a pleasant dream, only to realize it was all a nightmare upon waking up.

For Ultratumba, trajesaliva opted for analog synths to create immense walls of sound that sometimes linger with a dreamy sustain, while other times we can hear them decay into completely damaged frequencies, bordering on noise, but always retaining their oniric quality. The album displays its manifesto by opening with a lonely synthesizer in all its analog glory, which may lead some to believe they will be treated to a typical dark/synthwave album, but expect none of that trendy nonsense from trajedesaliva. “A casa por las vías” will put any doubts of this to rest, as it is one of the tracks that best showcases the fluctuating nature of this album. The band packs the song with so many different moods within its mere four minutes, but they do it seamlessly and while keeping everything minimal: We hear the synths, bass, unavena’s trembling voice and a drum machine.

There are references to “mother, child and father” but there are also mentions of graveyards and corpses coming to life. It’s all filtered through the lens of an almost childlike perspective, but it is a twisted one. Unavena’s lyrical contributions are intermittent, not being present in every song, and on the tracks that do feature her poetry, the spoken word passages don’t push the rest of the instrumentation to the back of the mix. The delivery fits the mood, avoiding being melodramatic or too plain (as it tends to be the case with spoken word); in some instances, the voice appears to be affected by slight electronic processing giving it an uncanny valley feel.

Ultratumba is ethereal, organic and delicately powerful. It possesses brutal force without being heavy or even abrasive at all times (although the full-blown attack on “Familia Ferro” hits really, really hard). It has its moments in which it leans into a sound Haus Arafna may have in their darkest moments, but there’s something eerie about the narrative and the composition that makes the album transition from beautiful to bizarre and from reassuring to unsettling in a way that other projects can’t. There is definitely a formula that repeats throughout the album, but it is not tiresome; even though all the tracks have the same elements giving them life (droning dissonances, icy synths creating haunting melodies, poetry), and pretty much fall within the same aesthetic, it is not redundant.

Is this how a dysfunctional family sounds like? We find warm embraces coming from the gentle textures created by the synths, only to be pushed away by hissing static and dissonant overtones; and then, like an abuser begging for forgiveness after the damage is done, dreamy synth lines coerce us into staying and enduring. The closing track sends us of in a similar way in which the album began -maybe alluding to a cyclical nature- but it does have a different feel; this begs the question: did we break from the cycle or are we forever trapped within it? What trajedesaliva achieved with this album is emotional complexity that can only come after having waited for the right moment to release this work, and it most definitely paid off.