REVIEW: Arankai - The Shape of Blue
There’s a difference between wearing your heart on your sleeve and ripping the entire thing out, holding it up to the light and asking everyone else what the fuck they’re doing with theirs. ARANKAI seems increasingly interested in the latter.
Following 2025’s A Portrait Of Red, the first instalment in an ambitious three-album series, The Shape Of Blue sees the American Midwest artist shift his focus beyond personal reflection, drawing on the experiences of others to explore rebellion, sacrifice, pride and resilience. It’s a broader perspective for a project already rooted in the complexities of the human experience, and one that promises to push his alternative metal sound into increasingly expansive territory.
Where A Portrait Of Red established the foundations, The Shape Of Blue sets out to broaden the picture. Its identity revolves around an immersive, water-soaked atmosphere that runs through the record’s production and songwriting, creating a framework for the heavier moments to collide with melancholy, experimentation and nostalgia. It’s an ambitious combination, particularly for an artist attempting to build a connected narrative across three albums rather than simply delivering another collection of tracks and calling it a day.
The concept is an intriguing one. Drawing inspiration from other people's experiences allows ARANKAI to explore emotional territory beyond his own immediate perspective, examining how people respond when their convictions, relationships and resilience are pushed to breaking point. Rebellion and sacrifice rarely exist in isolation, after all. Pride can be a shield, a weapon or the very thing standing between someone and the truth. And resilience? Sometimes it's admirable; sometimes it's simply what happens when giving up doesn't feel like an option.
That tension provides a compelling backdrop for The Shape Of Blue, with its track list suggesting a journey through confrontation, disillusionment and the search for something worth holding onto.
Opening with Helter Skelter (feat. buffalo_farm), the album begins with a title that immediately suggests disorder and instability. The guest feature also introduces another voice into the record's wider world, fitting neatly with an album that looks beyond a singular perspective. It's an appropriately chaotic-sounding starting point on paper for a record concerned with the messiness of the human experience.
I Hope It Hurts follows with a title that wastes absolutely no time getting uncomfortable. There is something inherently confrontational about those four words, suggesting the kind of emotional fallout where indifference would be considerably easier to stomach than honesty. It's a sentiment that fits the album's wider themes of sacrifice and pride, where pain can become inseparable from the things people refuse to let go of.
Elsewhere, Disobey and Playing God bring authority, resistance and control into the conversation. Both titles suggest an interest in the power struggles that emerge when people decide they know what's best for everyone else. Whether it's rejecting expectations or confronting someone else's sense of superiority, there's plenty of thematic ground to explore here. Nobody likes being told what to do, particularly by someone who has mistaken confidence for omniscience.
Sick & Sweet offers another compelling contradiction, its title balancing attraction against something decidedly more unsettling. It's a fitting addition to a record interested in the less straightforward aspects of human behaviour, where something can be desirable and damaging in equal measure. Sometimes the things we gravitate towards are precisely the things that leave us questioning our own judgement afterwards.
The emotional temperature shifts again across Let Down, TEMPER and Choke. Disappointment, anger and pressure sit comfortably alongside the album's broader concerns, suggesting a sequence built around the point at which internal struggles become increasingly difficult to contain. The titles alone evoke the familiar experience of holding everything together until the effort of maintaining that composure becomes its own problem.
Then comes Convince Me, a title that raises questions of trust, persuasion and the distance between what someone says and what they can actually prove. Have Faith offers an interesting thematic counterpoint, introducing the possibility of belief and perseverance amid the uncertainty. Together, they suggest the push and pull between scepticism and hope, two forces that can make even the simplest decisions feel unnecessarily complicated.
Closing with the title track, The Shape Of Blue, brings the album back to its defining atmosphere. Blue is an evocative choice, carrying associations with sadness, isolation and reflection while also suggesting depth and vastness. In the context of a three-album series, it feels like a fitting centrepiece for a project still developing its larger identity.
With The Shape Of Blue, ARANKAI is building towards something bigger than a standalone record, digging into the messy contradictions of human nature without pretending there's always a neat answer. There's still another chapter to come, but this second instalment pushes the story forward and leaves plenty of room for things to get darker. The story isn't finished yet, and that's exactly the point.
Score: 9/10
The Shape Of Blue will be released on 30th October 2026 via Hopeless Records.
Words: Mia Gailey
Photos: Hunter Hatch
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