In a House of Heartbeats tempt you into their land of slumber, dare you enter?
We can all agree dreams are weird, some people believe they are our subconscious sifting through the thoughts and detritus from the waking day, others believe they are a window into our deepest thoughts. I had a dream a while ago where I was in an old battered jeep fleeing a possessed giraffe who was able to shoot laser beams from its eyes who was destroying the village we were driving through - I’d love to know what that was all about to be honest! Anyway, you may be wondering why I’m blathering about dreams in the first place, well, dreams are the thread which runs though the album Divination of Dreams by In a House of Heartbeats
There’s a particular kind of silence that precedes the album. Not the absence of sound, but the stillness before something deeply internal begins to wake from its slumber. From the opening moments, it’s clear that this is not an album designed for passive consumption. It asks to be experienced, not just played.
Divination of Dreams lives in the liminal space between Post-Metal introspection, Post-Rock melancholy and dreamlike Shoegaze haze, but it never fully settles into any of those genres. Instead, it breathes. Slowly, deliberately, allowing textures to unfurl with an almost ritualistic patience. Guitars swell and recede like half-remembered visions, their distortion softened just enough to feel emotional rather than aggressive. The rhythm section rarely puts its hand up and demands attention, yet it anchors everything, grounding the album’s more ethereal impulses in something physical, something human.
Standout track “Cambion” sees the band at their most raucous, and it’s this aggression which transforms the dreamlike soundscapes into a darker, mercurial, more threatening nightmare dreamscape. Trying to outrun the internal monster chasing through your darkest thoughts you didn’t even realise you had, it takes you places you don’t want to go to, but relish the thrill of being there, a dichotomy at the very heart of this album.
I know I mentioned the one track, but really, what truly defines this record is its sense of emotional continuity. Rather than individual tracks competing for impact, the album unfolds as a single, evolving narrative. Motifs resurface like recurring symbols in a dream: familiar, but never quite the same. Melodies blur at the edges, dissolving into ambient passages that feel less like interludes and more like moments of reflection; necessary pauses where the listener is invited to process what’s just been felt.
There’s an undeniable vulnerability woven into the fabric of the album. In a House of Heartbeats aren’t chasing catharsis through sheer volume or density; instead, they let restraint do the heavy lifting. When the crescendos arrive (and they do) they feel earned, carrying the weight of everything that came before them. These moments don’t explode so much as they bloom, fragile yet overwhelming.
This is an album about intuition, memory, and the quiet violence of introspection. It doesn’t offer easy hooks or immediate gratification, but for those willing to surrender to its pacing and emotional logic, it reveals a depth that lingers long after the final notes fade. Like the dreams it seeks to divine, its meaning isn’t fixed, it shifts depending on where you are when you listen.
And perhaps that’s its greatest strength: this is music that doesn’t tell you what to feel. It simply opens the door and lets you walk through. A wonderfully arresting album that deserves to propel the band onto bigger things. It’s an interesting entity which has something to say (even without words) and that has got to be worth an hour of anyone’s time.
