Van Panther – Icarian (2025)
Irish alt-rock band Van Panther have gone straight in on their debut album, Icarian: eight tracks, thirty-two minutes, zero filler. Diving headfirst into the churning waters of post-punk and dreamlike alt-rock, emerging with something singular, each track has fizzing guitar lines, taut drums and lyrics that bite. If you like your alt-rock bruised, clever and a touch theatrical, this one’s for you.
From the opening notes of ‘A History of Violence’, the band sets a mood of anxious propulsion: guitars shimmer and fracture, percussion snaps tight, and vocals hover in a spectral half-light between confession and confrontation. There’s a palpable tension throughout. The sense of songs built for release, but too self-aware to ever fully surrender. This push and pull animates Icarian’s best moments, where melody and dissonance seem to wrestle for dominance without ever fully resolving.
Tracks like ‘Fire Out At Sea’ and ‘Komarov’ do the heavy lifting lyrically, spinning apocalyptic motifs into something oddly domestic, burning seas feel less like spectacle and more like the slow leak of everyday collapse. The band are good at economy: a line or two lands and it stays with you, lodged like grit in the mouth. ‘Bleeding Crowns’ is the record’s most immediate banger, scouring guitars and a chorus that refuses to be polite, while ‘Compos Mentis’ winds a little looser, the kind of track that breathes between the barbed lines.
Van Panther sits comfortably in the neighbourhood of bands like DIIV and Deerhunter. There’s that shimmering, nostalgia-tinged melancholy, but they also flirt with the jagged, confrontational side of post-punk (think Metz or Preoccupations on a particularly itchy day). The result is music that feels both intimate and widescreen: personal anxieties become civic malaise, private ghosts become public spectacle.
By the time ‘The Old Country’ closes things down, the mood is elegiac rather than defeated. Icarian is interested in holding contradiction: hopeful in its hopelessness, stubborn in its fragility. At thirty-two minutes, it doesn’t overstay its welcome; it simply makes its point and walks out, leaving you with that stubborn afterglow.
The production is enjoyable and sharp without losing atmosphere. There’s enough space for the synths to pad and the guitars to fracture, and the drums push urgency without steamrolling nuance. The mixes favour texture with little washes of noise and reverb that keep the songs feeling lived-in rather than slick. It’s a sound that traffics in tension: restraint vs. release, despair vs. defiance.
Throughout the album, there’s a restless energy here that recalls the nervy precision of early Interpol and the dreamlike sprawl of My Bloody Valentine, though Van Panther resist imitation, bending their influences into something sharper and more tactile. At just over half an hour, Icarian leaves no room for indulgence. Every track feels necessary, every transition deliberate. It’s a record that captures both the exhaustion and exhilaration of trying to exist meaningfully amid collapse. Truly a debut that’s equal parts bruised and beautiful. With Icarian, Van Panther announce themselves not merely as another promising Irish act, but as a band already fluent in their own language of chaos and catharsis. It’s an arresting, nervy, and deeply human debut.
Find out more about Van Panther on their official website, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Bandcamp and Spotify.
This artist was sent to us by Jawdropper Music
