Audiopile Review: Phil Elverum faced a daunting task following The Microphones in 2020, his masterful 40+ minute autobiographical return to a long-abandoned name. Now, pivoting back to his Mount Eerie alias, Elverum draws us closer to the varied untethered experimental spirit of his early work as The Microphones, contrasting with the more cohesive and thematic releases we’ve seen in recent years. In many ways Night Palace feels like the culmination of his decades-long journey through themes of nature, mortality, the violent realities of colonization and environmental destruction, with a great emphasis on our deep connections to family, place, and the natural world. Elverum’s approach here is raw and unrestrained—lo-fi indie folk, passages of Xasthur inspired black metal reminiscent of 2009’s Winds Poem, ambient collages of noise and field recordings that build a tangible atmosphere, and spoken word make up the album’s consistently varied track list. His voice—intimate and unmistakably earnest—emerges through the distortion and layered textures, supplementing these miniature worlds with his perspective, musings, and a pointed message. While Elverum’s words carry a profound weight, the instrumental passages are equally poignant, conveying a Godspeed-like urgency and depth that rewards repeated listens. For longtime fans or those still drawn to lo-fi DIY music, Night Palace is a reflective work worth exploring. As with much of Elverum’s work, this album exists wholly in the present, suggesting that there is only the now and that there is no end—a mystic and deeply personal glimpse into both Elverum’s world and the one we all share.

Night Palace appears as a culmination of eras, arrived at after tumbling through decades of a tumultuous life and building from scratch in the settled dust. The 26 track album is a palace of many rooms, all welcoming, all varied. The songs stand vivid in their diamond sharp eloquence and distorted feedback, but only after traveling the album as a whole do we find the door. The palace is dilapidated with moss dripping through, airy, bright and open.

This is a return to the beloved deep analog fuzz world of the Microphones’ the Glow pt. 2 (2001) and the many thickly embroidered Mount Eerie universes that have followed. Smashed tape, breathing air organs, crackling tube amps and a welcome living reality just outside the open window all entwine to push the definition of what’s “home” and what’s “studio”, of what’s a “song” and what’s at the heart of the unmediated idea itself.

Phil Elverum has slowly acquired an underground cult status since the late 1990’s for exactly this kind of work; building recorded atmospheric worlds that are distinctly bottomless with a fuzzed out mystery, while the songs themselves speak with a raw intimacy that can be shocking to hear. These are recordings of an individual mind and heart going deeper within while turning over each stone along the way.

Mount Eerie released another ambitious world of an album called Sauna in 2014. Immediately after, Elverum became a father and then his partner fell ill with a fatal cancer and died a year later. These and other brutal waves of change kept pounding for years and it was all documented in the white knuckle songwriting on the albums A Crow Looked At Me (2017), Now Only (2018) and Lost Wisdom pt. 2 (2019).

After a natural disaster, things do grow back. A person catching their breath after a traumatic experience has a kind of reoriented clarity. Art that is made without urgency or expectation has a chance to reach beyond the usual. It was in this patient clarity that Night Palace came to be written and recorded from 2022 to 2024. Elverum’s life settled back down and he reassembled the old analog reel to reel studio at his quiet deep woods home and began experimenting again.

“I saw lighting last night, but heard nothing”, the first song’s first words announce. Mystery is back! Over the next 80 minutes the songs weave our concrete reality together with the charged and rippling world beyond. Birds squawk and we speak back. These are songs of re-surrendering to a state of wonder and abandoning the wrung-dry skepticism that this hard world can impose. And here is the hard world too, in songs of decolonization and backwoods protest. “Some zen, some Zinn” Elverum has joked. With two feet on the ground, he writes with a sharp eye trained toward the quiet flashes in the blue distance. The ground shifts.