Album Review: Monolink – The Beauty Of It All

Monolink’s The Beauty Of It All feels like stepping into a lucid dream, one where electronic textures and organic songwriting dissolve into each other with seamless ease. It drifts from shadows into light and back again, wrapping existential questions in hypnotic grooves.

The Beauty Of It All opens with Call of the Void, a spacious, slightly haunting opener setting the emotional scaffold. The track doesn’t collapse into bombast, rather, it lets sorrow linger, breathing in the pauses, letting the synths echo like memories. Perfect World snaps into a more immediate groove, fracturing the stillness of Call of the Void with jittery percussion and textured electronics. Powerful Play follows with warm, folk-tinged acoustic strums threaded through a tense, propulsive and electronic beat. Here, Monolink leans into the hybrid approach he is known for and, as a former busker in his earlier years, you can sense the echo of his busking days and late nights in the city within this song.

A third of the way through the album we reach the track Avalanche. Avalanche slows the mood into something denser – layered pads and a sense of gathering weight make the track feel like a slow-motion drop where tension feels pleasurable. In My Place leans into echo and space, an atmospheric piece that foregrounds vocal phrasing and subtle rhythmic detail over big hooks. Mesmerized starts off as a quiet introspective melody that builds into a trance-leaning cut which loops and hypnotises, balancing a melancholic and spiralling melody with a steady dancefloor rhythm. These three tracks especially exemplify how Monolink can pivot from introspective balladry to focused, groove-infused songwriting without losing cohesion – it’s an impressive listen.

Promised Land takes a more freeform turn, an ambient drift you could say, going on a slow unfold with space, time and percussion. It’s a moment of letting go, of relinquishing form to feeling. Beacon recalibrates you, puts you back in touch with the world after Promised Land with its folk tonality and quieter textures – little percussion taps, piano and chiming guitar layers. It’s another introspective piece weaved with the sense of hope and warmth through it, like sunlight through leaves. To me, Phoenix sounds like a play on concepts and soundscapes that are visited in earlier tracks. It’s like a re-work and a re-birth of these tracks in a darker and deeper frequency – where the synth has grit and the vocals have urgency.

Once I Understood closes the album somewhere between a lullaby and an existential exhale. It is reflective, soft and you leave it behind feeling like you’ve truly travelled inward. What strikes me most about The Beauty Of It All is how Monolink leans into restraint and control – the choices to soften, to pause, to unpack emotionally rather than push outward. In the trajectory from grief with Call of the Void to the quiet understanding of Once I Understood, there’s a human arc of loss, reconnection, and acceptance. His skilled, hybrid approach to music through braiding intimate lyrics, acoustic detail and electronica together make this album a beautiful one to listen to from top to bottom.

Zoe V.