ABANDONED OCEAN 🇫🇮 — Inner Dusk EP Review
Review by Infectious Unease Radio / Subterranean Zone Radio — Voice In The Void
Written by Gordon Lawrence Taylor
Artist / Release Details
Artist: Abandoned Ocean 🇫🇮 Finland
Release: Inner Dusk
Format: EP
Released: 6 May 2026
Country: Finland 🇫🇮
Style / Genre: Post-Metal / Doom Metal / Lo-Fi / Dark Singer-Songwriter / Atmospheric Metal
Label: Self-released
Promotion / Press: Inverse Music Group 🇫🇮 Finland
Copyright: Dream Keeper Music 2026
Abandoned Ocean is the new English-language post-metal / doom project from Finnish musician Harri Kauppinen. Inner Dusk is the project’s debut EP, introducing a dark, intimate, and deeply atmospheric world built around post-metal weight, doom heaviness, lo-fi texture, and a wounded singer-songwriter spirit.
Across three tracks — “Escaping from It All,” “Unpleasant Light,” and “I Am the Darkness” — Abandoned Ocean moves through silence, heaviness, memory, and inner shadow. This is music that does not try to overwhelm with volume alone. Instead, it pulls the listener into a narrow, gloomy world where darkness feels personal, human, and strangely beautiful.
Band / Project Members & Contributors
Harri Kauppinen
Vocals, guitars, keyboards, drum machine
Music and lyrics
Producer
Cover / cover photo
Teemu Liekkala
Guitars, bass
Mixing and mastering at TL-AD Studio
Cover work
Otto Närhi
Piano
Hiili Hiilesmaa
Pre-production with Harri Kauppinen
Arrangement contribution
The EP was written by Harri Kauppinen, with Teemu Liekkala, Otto Närhi, and producer Hiili Hiilesmaa also involved. Kauppinen, Liekkala, and Närhi also share history from the Finnish dark metal band Beyond The Dream, active together from 2005–2014.
Official Links
Website:
https://www.abandonedocean.com/
Bandcamp:
https://abandonedocean.bandcamp.com/
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/abandonedocean_official
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/abandonedocean/
Lyric Video — “Unpleasant Light”:
https://youtu.be/2uNxmYTPN70
Listen to the EP on streaming services:
https://push.fm/fl/abandonedocean-innerdusk
Inverse Music Group:
https://www.inverse.fi/
Review
There is something very honest about Inner Dusk. It does not arrive like a polished rock product trying to impress the listener quickly. It arrives slowly, heavily, and privately, like something pulled out of silence after many years of being buried. Abandoned Ocean feels like a project built from solitude, memory, shadow, and the kind of heaviness that does not need to shout to make its presence known.
This is the new English-written material from Finnish musician Harri Kauppinen, and the title Inner Dusk suits the release beautifully. This is not full darkness in a theatrical sense. It is dusk as an inner condition — that strange hour between light and disappearance, where the room is still visible but everything has already started to change shape.
Across these three tracks, Abandoned Ocean moves through post-metal, doom metal, lo-fi atmosphere, and dark singer-songwriter feeling. The sound is heavy, but it is also intimate. It has weight, but not in a showy way. The guitars feel worn and emotional, the vocals feel close and human, and the atmosphere has a grey Finnish sadness running through it. It is music that sounds like it has been left alone in a cold room with only a small lamp still burning.
1. Escaping from It All
The EP opens with “Escaping from It All,” and immediately the listener is pulled into a heavy but personal space. The track has that feeling of wanting to leave everything behind, not in a dramatic fantasy way, but in the exhausted way people sometimes feel when the world becomes too loud, too bright, too demanding.
The guitars carry a slow emotional pressure. There is doom in the structure, but there is also something fragile underneath it. The song does not feel like it is only trying to be heavy. It feels like it is trying to survive its own heaviness.
Harri Kauppinen’s voice sits inside the music rather than above it. That is one of the strongest parts of Abandoned Ocean’s sound. The vocal does not feel separate from the atmosphere. It feels like part of the same room, the same wall, the same shadow. The track has a private quality, almost like someone singing from inside a place they are trying to escape but cannot fully leave.
As an opening track, it sets the world of Inner Dusk very well. This is not music of easy release. It is music of slow movement, internal pressure, and the search for a way out.
2. Unpleasant Light
“Unpleasant Light” is one of the strongest moments on the EP. The title itself is excellent because it reverses the usual idea of light as comfort or rescue. Here, light is not warm. It is not healing. It is exposing, uncomfortable, almost violent.
The song carries a bleak and atmospheric pull. There is a strong post-metal feeling in the way the track grows and breathes, but the lo-fi and singer-songwriter side gives it a more damaged, human edge. It does not feel clean. It feels lived-in. That roughness works in the song’s favour because it gives the music honesty.
The piano and additional textures help deepen the feeling without softening it too much. There is a sense of a person standing in front of something they do not want to see, but cannot avoid. The unpleasant light becomes emotional truth. It becomes memory. It becomes the moment when darkness is no longer hiding anything from you.
The lyric video for “Unpleasant Light” also makes sense as the visual entry point into the EP. It feels like the track that best introduces Abandoned Ocean’s world: heavy, grey, wounded, atmospheric, and quietly intense.
3. I Am the Darkness
The closing track, “I Am the Darkness,” feels like the deepest descent on the EP. After the desire to escape and the discomfort of being exposed by light, this track turns inward completely.
The title could easily have become theatrical, but the song does not feel like a costume. It feels more personal than that. “I Am the Darkness” sounds less like a declaration of power and more like an admission. It is the sound of someone recognising the darkness not as something outside them, but as something they carry.
Musically, the track has a slow, heavy emotional gravity. The doom influence is strong, but again, Abandoned Ocean’s strength is that it does not rely only on heaviness. There is space here. There is restraint. There is atmosphere. The track feels like it is breathing through old wounds.
As a closing piece, it gives the EP a strong final shape. Inner Dusk begins with escape, moves through painful exposure, and ends with identification: the darkness is no longer just around the narrator — it has become part of the self.
Final Thoughts
Inner Dusk is a short EP, but it feels complete. It does not need more tracks to explain itself. These three songs create a narrow, cold, and emotional passageway into Abandoned Ocean’s world.
What makes the release work is its balance between heaviness and intimacy. The music has post-metal and doom weight, but it also carries the vulnerability of a dark singer-songwriter record. It feels handmade, personal, and honest. There is no artificial gloss here. The rough edges are part of the emotional truth of the EP.
Abandoned Ocean 🇫🇮 feels like a project born from silence after a long absence, and that gives Inner Dusk a special weight. Harri Kauppinen has returned with music that sounds dark, slow, wounded, and deeply human. The EP does not offer easy comfort, but it does offer a kind of strange hope — not bright hope, not simple hope, but the hope of still being able to make something out of emptiness.
Inner Dusk is a passage into gloom, but not without purpose. It is a record for listeners who understand that darkness can be painful, but also honest; that heaviness can be beautiful; and that sometimes the most powerful music is the music that sounds like it was built from the ruins of silence.
Abandoned Ocean 🇫🇮 — Inner Dusk is dark, intimate, heavy, atmospheric, and emotionally sincere — a strong debut EP from a Finnish artist stepping back into the void with something deeply personal to say.
Tracklist
-
Escaping from It All — 04:37
-
Unpleasant Light — 04:40
-
I Am the Darkness — 04:59