Spiral Shades: Riffs Across a Wire That Should’ve Snapped by Now

They’re continents apart. Mumbai. Vennesla. Two rooms, two climates, no shared time zone, no shared breath. Just a signal dragging riffs through lag and latency, pressed flat and grainy through inboxes and cables that probably weren’t built to carry this kind of weight. But it works. Somehow. It still works. And that’s the part that gets under your skin.

Spiral Shades don’t feel like a band so much as a persistence. Like doom itself cracked into two and started crawling in opposite directions, then found a way back to itself through the noise. No studio. No jam sessions. No sweaty practice space where someone’s amp is always on the fritz. Just Khushal Bhadra in Mumbai, writing songs and pouring vocals into the haze. And Filip Petersen in Norway, the riff master, stacking layer after layer of slow-burn thunder. That’s it. That’s the whole operation. And it sounds richer than most bands with five guys and a van.

Hypnosis Sessions (2013) came out of nowhere. No push, no polish. Just a Bandcamp link and a record that felt like it had been found under a floorboard in a dead man’s house. The mix is all murk and drift—guitars like ash clouds, vocals smeared across the top, drums ticked out by machine but buried enough that you forget they’re not human. It’s lo-fi in the way that matters: not as a pose, but as a limit. And those limits serve the sound. Give it shape. Give it that worn-down feel, like something too heavy to shine.

Filip doesn’t write riffs as much as he lays them down—slow, crumbling, heavy in the hips. No flash, no runaround. Just groove and drag. Riffs that take their time and don’t ask permission. The kind that feel like they’ve always existed, like someone just had to dig them up. And Khushal doesn’t try to ride over it. He sinks into it. His voice isn’t a spotlight, it’s a slow exhale. Sometimes barely there. Sometimes dry and frayed like old fabric. It fits because it doesn’t try to outshine the fuzz—it fades into it, lets the texture speak.

And then they disappear. Almost. A second album was teased, then blinked out. No shows. No press run. No visual rebrand. Just the music, and then silence.

But they weren’t gone. Just quiet. Still sending files across the void. Still chipping away from opposite ends of the world. And then in 2023—Revival. Ten years later, and they’re still at it. Still writing doom like it’s the only thing holding the walls up. Still dragging sound through time zones and oceans, proof that this thing won’t die if it’s rooted deep enough.

Revival doesn’t break the mold. It thickens it. It leans heavier on the atmosphere, lets the tracks sink deeper into their own weight. It’s a record that sounds tired in the right way—not bored, just worn. Like it’s been through some things. Like Filip’s riffs picked up dust on their way across the wire. You can hear it in the pacing. The way nothing rushes, nothing gets cleaned up too much. It still feels like Spiral Shades. Just older. Meaner. More lived-in.

And that’s the strange part. This band has never existed in a room. Never plugged into the same outlet. But the music feels closer than most bands that tour together for years. There’s a weird intimacy in the sprawl. A closeness in the distance. The separation isn’t a bug, it’s the whole spine of the thing. You can feel the delay. The drift. The effort it takes to keep something alive across space. And it gives the music this slow tension, this sense that it’s always on the verge of unraveling, but never quite does.

Filip doesn’t overplay. Khushal doesn’t overstate. They sit in the riff. Let it roll out until it catches on something. It’s doom with no destination. No gimmick. No escape hatch. Just the churn and the hum and the slow pull of repetition until your body syncs with it. That’s the trance. That’s the hypnosis.

Spiral Shades were never about invention. They’re about pressure. Atmosphere. That sticky, analog feel you only get when someone’s doing it for no reason but the sound itself. They don’t advertise. They don’t explain. They barely exist. But somehow, they keep dragging this noise out of the air. Across continents. Across years. Across every reason it should’ve stopped by now.

And that’s the thing. You can’t kill it. Not with distance. Not with time. Not with better gear or cleaner mixes. Spiral Shades keep going—not because they’re chasing anything, but because they’re caught in it. Still riffing. Still recording. Still sending smoke signals through the hum.

Still happening.