Released on 17 December 2025, Dominion of the Stars is an intensely personal electronic EP from Belgium’s Innocent Darkness, created as a tribute to the artist’s mother, who passed away on 14 August 2024. Rather than approaching grief through conventional songwriting, the project turns loss into atmosphere, texture and sound. Created in the artist’s parents’ home and shaped by long walks through the forest, the EP feels rooted in a very specific period of reflection, where musical ideas became a way of processing emotions that were difficult to express otherwise. The result is deliberately raw and intimate, prioritising feeling over studio perfection.
Innocent Darkness works within the darker and more atmospheric side of electronic music, drawing influence from Monomorte, Noire Antidote, Sidewalks and Skeletons, White Ring and Salem. The music was built using Vital VST, Circuit Tracks and a Yamaha Seqtrak Black, giving the project a distinctly hands-on character. The artist also makes a point of emphasising that the EP was created without artificial intelligence, with the music emerging through experimentation rather than an attempt to achieve polished perfection. That approach fits the emotional purpose of the release: this is music made during grief, with imperfections and unpredictability becoming part of its identity.
What makes Dominion of the Stars particularly affecting is the reason behind its creation. Innocent Darkness describes music as a way to make something beautiful from the loss of the person who meant the most to them, and the EP carries that sense of personal catharsis throughout. The artist’s words, “O dear mom, hear me, make this sound’s hope u hear them!!”, give the project an especially direct emotional centre. With a catalogue said to have grown to around 60 albums through similar moments of inspiration, Innocent Darkness clearly treats music as an ongoing form of creative exploration. Dominion of the Stars stands as one deeply personal chapter in that journey—a shadowy, homespun electronic work shaped by grief, memory, experimentation and the healing possibility of simply making sound.
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