7/10

Awake & Dreaming’s debut album 'Inevitable' is an experience built around contrast. Across ten tracks, the Canadian quartet move between piano-led intimacy, electronic atmosphere and walls of distorted guitar, allowing quiet reflection and full-blooded alt-rock release to sit side by side.

But instead of treating vulnerability and spectacle as these two opposing ideas, the band let one feed directly into the other. Smaller moments feel deliberately exposed, while the heavier sections arrive with enough weight to make the emotional shifts feel powerful throughout.

Lead single ‘Underwater’ captures that tension particularly well. Framed as a late-night internal monologue about letting go of whatever is pulling you down, it carries a sense of isolation that gradually widens into something more overwhelming. The image of drifting too far beneath the surface suits a band whose music repeatedly moves between stillness and pressure.

And across the wider album, that duality becomes part of a much larger theme. 'Inevitable' looks to explore what it means to remain emotionally present in a culture that often rewards detachment. The sequencing begins from a place of feeling caught inside the machinery of everyday life before gradually moving towards something more open and hopeful.

There are clear touchpoints in Radiohead and Muse, particularly in the combination of art-rock ambition and widescreen dynamics, while Sasha Kristoff’s vocal brings a more ethereal quality to the quieter material. Yet the album’s strongest moments come when those influences recede and the band’s own sense of scale takes over.

For a debut full-length, 'Inevitable' is impressively considered. Awake & Dreaming sound less interested in proving how loud they can become than in making the distance between silence and impact matter. It's an approach that gives the album an enormous emotional weight that leaves a lasting impression long after its biggest moments have passed.