There’s something slightly worn-in about Electro Romantica, like it didn’t arrive freshly pressed but finally surfaced after years of sitting in different places, half-formed, half-finished, waiting for the right moment to become a record.
Metameria have been around since 2015, but this third album doesn’t really behave like a “third step forward” in the clean sense. It feels more like a document that survived distance. Ukraine, Spain, the UK - not as aesthetic detail, but as something that actually shaped how this thing breathes.
And you hear that immediately in how unevenly it moves.
This is still electro-gothic rock, technically. But that label only works if you don’t look too closely. The electronics carry most of the structure now - not decoration, not atmosphere padding, but actual skeleton. The guitars show up more like interruptions than foundations.
What makes it interesting is that it doesn’t try to smooth any of that out.
The band talks about war, exhaustion, uncertainty, and the slow erosion of normal life. That’s not subtext here - it’s direct, sometimes uncomfortably so. And for the first time, everything is in Ukrainian, which changes the record more than any stylistic shift ever could. It removes distance. There’s no translation layer anymore.
"Khvori Uiavy" hits early and doesn’t really soften its edges for anyone. It’s not written like a metaphor - it’s written like something remembered. Later tracks like "Totalitarnyi Morok" and "Strashni Pisni" lean harder into the darker end of the electronic spectrum, where rhythm feels less like movement and more like pressure building in a closed room.
Not everything lands equally well.
"Modnyi Klub", for example, sits oddly in the tracklist. It’s not a bad idea, but it doesn’t carry the same weight as what surrounds it, and you can feel the album’s momentum loosen slightly when it appears. The same goes for parts of the mid-section where the record drifts into its own internal logic a bit too comfortably - it stops pushing forward and starts circling.
That’s the real tension here: when Metameria are focused, the record feels sharp, controlled, almost suffocating in its clarity. When they loosen up, it starts to blur.
"Sira Nostalhiia" is one of the few places where that looseness actually works. It doesn’t try to hit anything heavy or dramatic - it just sits in its own space long enough to feel like air returning to the record.
Production-wise, this is a clean, tightly managed album. Sometimes too clean. The emotional weight doesn’t come from distortion or sonic aggression; it comes from arrangement and restraint. That works most of the time, but it also means when a track doesn’t connect, there’s nothing else to fall back on.
By the time it reaches "Dva Zhyttia (Instrumental Remix)", the album doesn’t really feel like it’s concluding anything. It just stops applying pressure. That’s probably the closest thing it has to resolution.
Electro Romantica isn’t balanced, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It swings between clarity and drift, between sharp emotional focus and sections that feel like they’re still searching for shape.
But when it locks in, it’s one of those records that feels uncomfortably close - not because it’s loud, but because it’s direct.
https://www.facebook.com/metamera.official
Thanks to Grand Sounds PR.
