REVIEW: Night Ritualz - Time Is A Thief

NIGHT RITUALZ’s second album arrives with a title that sounds almost cliché, until you sit inside it. Time does steal; it steals hours, momentum, youth, clarity. On Time Is A Thief, NIGHT RITUALZ leans into that quiet erosion and turns it into something you can dance to in the dark. Based in San Antonio and releasing his sophomore effort through Metropolis Records, NIGHT RITUALZ continues refining the sound he’s half-jokingly labelled “fuck wave” - a collision of darkwave, EBM, synth-punk, and post-punk that feels more cohesive here than it did on his self-titled debut. The edges are sharper. The mood is thicker. The emotional centre is clearer. 

The title track, Time Is A Thief, sets the atmosphere with patience rather than grandiosity. The drums land strong and deliberate, but the track never rushes. Dreamy darkwave textures bloom around the percussion, and the vocals drift through the mix like they’re emerging from a fog. There’s a lot of confidence in that restraint, and as both opener and namesake this track establishes the album’ thesis: we are not sprinting through these songs, we are inhabiting them. That sense of suspended time becomes more intimate on Living In This Bed. The line “this is the best I’ve ever felt” lands with a thud rather than a triumph. In a time where “bed rotting” has become comedic shorthand for quiet burnout, the lyric cuts depressingly close to home. It’s both comforting and unsettling to hear someone articulate the paradox of relief in stillness, where the underlying suggestion is that life outside the duvet may be too overwhelming to cope with. The bass carries the emotional weight of the track, tying together hazy synths and giving everything a quiet gravity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDAyniVpv1c

The album’s political undercurrent rises most obviously on Brown Skin. Here, NIGHT RITUALZ asks “why’s it feel like people want us to disappear?”. It’s a stark line, and feels uncomfortably precise in the current political climate. The question hangs in the air rather than resolving into anger or defiance. That restraint gives it more power, capturing the quiet, insidious feeling of erasure. The production mirrors that tension, balancing warmth and unease so the track never tips into didacticism.  In the latter half of the album, Cluster shifts the atmosphere. At just over ninety seconds in length, it’s a purely instrumental pulse of industrial texture, metallic but measured. There’s no vocals, no narrative handrail, acting as a pivot point and tightening the tension before guiding the listener into Whoreish. The track’s EBM drive and confrontational edge land harder because of that stripped-back build-up; nothing here feels accidental.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw7eBWdw2A4

Threaded throughout all of this is NIGHT RITUALZ’s bilingual lyricism, weaving English and Spanish in a way that feels organic rather than ornamental. It isn’t deployed for aesthetic flair, instead reflecting his lived experience. This duality gives the album a fascinating texture, especially on tracks Ya No Está and Un Tiro, where the language shift mirrors an emotional shift. DEPECHE MODE’s influence can be traced in the melancholic electronics of both tracks, but the cultural layering pushes their sound somewhere much more personal and regionally grounded.  The bilingual thread feels especially fitting on the closing track, My Baby, My Love. After an album preoccupied with stagnation, erasure, and the slow theft of time, the blend of language here softens the edges without dissolving the darkness completely. It feels intimate, almost disarming. Love, in this context, isn’t naïve or escapist. It’s another way of marking time, a stark reminder that connections persist even as everything else erodes.

What makes Time Is A Thief really resonate is its refusal to treat gloom as mere aesthetic. The beats are club-ready, the synths immersive, yet there is always a human pulse beneath the machinery. NIGHT RITUALZ isn’t simply crafting an atmosphere, he’s mapping survival and identity. The album moves, but never hurries. It invites you to dance while quietly asking what you’re trying to outrun.

Score: 8/10

Time Is A Thief will be released on February 20th 2026, via Metropolis Records.

Words: Zuzanna Pazola

Photos: Night Ritualz