7/10

There’s a restless energy running through 'Camera Obscura' that doesn’t settle into neat conclusions or tidy genre boxes. Instead, Scopitone (the project of Belgian artist Vincent Roose) delivers a debut album that feels like an ongoing internal dialogue, unfolding in real time.

This is an album that feels reactive, immediate, and almost necessary right from the start. The songs shift shape constantly, moving from sparse, introspective passages into dense, layered constructions that seem to push against their own boundaries. There’s a sense that each track is searching for its own language, rather than conforming to a pre-existing one.

But what ties the record together is its emotional weight. Roose approaches sound as a way of processing unease, and you can hear that tension in the way the music expands and contracts, sometimes drifting into near stillness before building into something more urgent.

Conceptually, the album leans into ideas that feel both historical and deeply present. The references are filtered through a personal lens, turning abstract concepts into something tangible and immediate. It’s less about explaining the world and more about reacting to it.

As a debut collection, 'Camera Obscura' doesn’t offer easy entry points or obvious hooks, but that’s precisely its strength. It asks us to engage with it, sit with the discomfort, and find meaning within the noise.