Album Descriptions: Taethen - Illusory Sensations (2026)

I don't want to be too specific about what the story in the album is, as I don't want to spoil it and I want to leave it somewhat up to the listener's interpretation. As to how the album came to be, most of the material has actually been composed for a while now, and that hasn't changed much, but lyrics, production, mixing, and mastering are what, at this point, have taken years. With lyrics, the themes that I wanted the album to explore changed during these years, and some songs went through multiple different iterations of lyrics and themes before I settled on the final ones. The album delves into existential conflicts in the human mind, such as the chase for meaning, whether ignorance truly is bliss, and how one can define "objective" or "unfiltered" reality. As to how these conflicts affect the main character in the album, I again leave it up to the listener's interpretation. When it comes to creating music completely independently, it's both freeing and limiting. Freeing in the sense that I alone get to make all the decisions and I don't need to compromise. I get to write exactly the song that I want to write. But it's limiting in the sense that I cannot come up with new ideas through jamming with other people, which I only have limited experience with outside of Taethen but have enjoyed. But as for an approach, I just write whatever I feel like writing at any given moment, and change sounds quite a bit, and once I have enough songs that I feel would fit on the same album, I start to approach it from the perspective of the album rather than just individual songs. Coming up with ideas is usually either me noodling or improvising around with the guitar or some sound just appearing in my head and me writing it down. Usually any given song is a combination of these two approaches.

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