We Shoot Music

The first album of Źrenice, Śnienie”, didn’t reveal itself to me in one clean listen, it unfolded slowly. Musically, the impact was immediate, complex, layered, often brutal, but never careless or gratuitous. There’s craft here, tension, movement, the kind of record that keeps you alert and refuses to dissolve into background noise. Even before meaning enters the picture, the music already holds you.

That approach makes sense once you understand how “Śnienie” came into being. After the final concert of their previous band, the musicians chose not to continue under inertia. They closed that chapter entirely and started again. Months of shaping, searching and refining sound without a voice, letting structures exist before knowing what they would eventually carry. The search for a vocalist was open, and when they posted an online advertisement and found Kamila, the shift was immediate. As they explain, “Kamila prepared a demo for one of our songs, and the moment we heard it, we knew she carried the emotional depth we were looking for”.

Kamila’s arrival didn’t change the band’s direction so much as clarify it. What mattered wasn’t technical display, but presence. “It wasn’t just the tone or technique”, they explain, “but the way her voice carried vulnerability and intention”. There’s a difference between singing emotion and allowing emotion to exist inside a song, and that distinction sits at the heart of “Śnienie”. “It felt natural and unforced, as if she instinctively understood the emotional space of the song and knew how to inhabit it”, they add. From that point on, the album began to take shape not as a collection of tracks, but as a shared inner space. Kamila’s way of approaching the material aligned closely with what the band had already been building, while also bringing “her own sensitivity and artistic intuition, influencing both the lyrical layer and the emotional direction of the music”.

The album’s title reflects that inward turn. Not sen, the dream as an object, but śnienie, the act of dreaming itself, a process rather than a state, something unstable, ongoing and unresolved. “We prefer to leave the interpretation of the title to the listener”, they explain. For Kamila, dreaming becomes a metaphor for life itself, “some may feel that life itself resembles a dream from which we might one day awaken”, but it is also about illusion, “especially the illusions we create within ourselves”. That refusal to overdefine meaning extends to the album’s atmosphere as well. There were no reference films or visual manifestos guiding the sound. “Rather than specific films or artworks, the dreamlike quality emerged from certain moods and inner images”, they explain, “fragmented memories, fleeting emotions, and that unclear space between consciousness and sleep”. The music was “more inspired by atmosphere than concrete references”.

You hear that immediately in the structure. “Brama lasu…” [Gate Of The Forest…] doesn’t function as a song so much as an entrance, built from forest sounds, water, wind, animals and ambient textures, with no voice and no narrative, only a threshold. You’re not inside the album yet, you’re stepping into it. At the other end, “…lasu skraj” […The Edge Of The Forest] mirrors that gesture. Water returns, birds also, including the calm, watchful presence of an owl. There’s no ambient music this time, only quiet and space. The album withdraws slowly, giving you time to relax, almost like a stretching session after physical exertion, allowing body and mind to settle.

Between those two points, the titles trace an inward movement rather than a storyline: “Neuroza” [Neurosis], “Inni” [Others], “Endymion”, “Stara Chata” [The Old Hut], “Czarownica” [The Witch], “Sam” [Alone]. These feel less like scenes than states, anxiety, distance, sleep, memory, intuition, solitude. The forest becomes the space in which these emotional states are encountered rather than explained.

That inward focus mirrors the band’s creative process. Krzysztof usually brings initial musical ideas, but they’re treated as foundations rather than instructions. “Our collaboration is based on giving each member the freedom to express their own ideas”, they explain. Arrangements grow collectively through listening, and lyrics on “Śnienie” were written by Kamila, Maciej and Krzysztof, with Kamila increasingly stepping forward as the main lyricist on newer material, a shift that feels organic rather than strategic. “On our new material Kamila is taking the lead as the main lyricist”.

One song makes that openness particularly visible. “Stara Chata” began in a very different place. “In the earliest sketch that song was much slower and doom-like”, they recall. During rehearsals, everything shifted when “Maciek provided a beat that was faster and more complex”. The decisive moment came when “once we started trusting the song’s mood rather than its initial structure, it naturally grew into something more expressive”. The transformation didn’t come from enforcing a plan, but from attention and collective adjustment.

That same openness runs through the album emotionally, and it isn’t always comfortable. Some lyrics demanded more than others, not because of specific lines, but because of the atmosphere they required. “Some lyrics were emotionally demanding simply because they touched on very fragile inner states”. Openness here isn’t theatrical, it’s quiet, sustained and shared. Among those moments, “Sam” carries particular weight. “Collectively, ‘Sam’ feels especially personal”, they say, “as it encapsulates many of the emotions and images that could have been experienced on both personal and collective level”. There’s something in it that makes you want to fully understand the lyrics because the emotion feels precise and anchored in lived experience. My Polish isn’t strong enough to catch every nuance, but the emotional signal comes through clearly. That gap between understanding and feeling doesn’t weaken the song, it intensifies it. This is solitude without spectacle, direct, exposed and unresolved.

“Sam” and “Endymion” unfold inside the same state of mind, one lingering in stillness, the other moving through cycles of breaking and reassembling. As the band’s debut single, it openly confronts depression, not as abstract darkness, but as a lived cycle of falling apart and slowly rebuilding. “‘Endymion’ confronts one of the most deeply affecting issues of our time: the experience of depression and the journey toward rediscovering a sense of purpose”. The song traces collapse and slow recovery, framed as a tribute “to the brave and the sensitive, the quiet souls who peel away the layers of illusion that often surround our daily lives”. These are not heroic figures in a dramatic sense, but inward, often unseen, and when they rise again, the band suggest, “they bring warmth to others”. That idea gains weight knowing this was the band’s debut single, emerging from a period of transition, closure and rebuilding.

That attentiveness carried into the studio. As vocals and arrangements were added, songs continued to evolve. “There were moments when songs revealed a different identity”, they explain, and in those moments, “we chose to follow what the song seemed to demand rather than what we originally intended”. Some of the album’s most honest moments came from that willingness to adjust and let go. Before any of it was formally recorded, a weekend session dedicated to demo vocals marked a turning point. “That was the moment we felt everything truly coming together”, not technically, but emotionally. “Creating music while spending time together is something we cherish”.

Trying to reduce “Śnienie” to genre misses the point. Alternative rock, post rock, black metal and folk elements surface throughout, but none of them lead. “For us, emotion is always the starting point”. Coherence comes from feeling, not categorisation. Released on 18/03/2026 via Via Nocturna, “Śnienie” is already imagined beyond the studio. Live performances matter, but with intention. “We want to focus on quality of our live performances, not quantity”. Visuals and lighting will play a role, “creating a space that feels immersive and dreamlike, rather than purely performative”.

Playing in Gdańsk is very much a hope. “We would absolutely love to play there”. As someone based in Gdańsk, I’m genuinely looking forward to the possibility of seeing them here. This is a band worth giving time and space to, and a live setting feels like the natural place for “Śnienie” to fully unfold. If the opportunity comes, it deserves an audience willing to listen and show up.

The album ends where it began, in the forest. The intensity happens inside, while the world outside continues. That feels faithful to “Śnienie”. You enter, you experience, you leave, and whatever happened inside the dream doesn’t need to be fully translated to matter.