Martin Templum Domini – Mankind
Martin Templum Domini – Mankind
Lion Music
Release Date: 11/02/2026
Review by Jon Deaux
8/10
Barcelona’s Martin Templum Domini have created an album that explores mankind’s destruction of itself through trying to repair itself, and that feels to me at least like reviewing an album that explores time travel when you know that one of the musicians involved never got to hear it before it was unleashed, because sadly drummer Mario Vico died of a sudden heart attack before “Mankind” was let loose on an unsuspecting public, which is just cosmically bloody-minded of the universe and makes you question whether it is just simply taking the piss.
The group chose to go ahead and release it as a tribute, which is either the most brilliant thing or the proggiest thing ever. Probably both. I am still on the fence on that particular issue.
The premise: Mankind is circling the drain. The climate’s buggered, everyone’s hungry, and the best that can be said about the state of society at large is that it’s playing that game where it’s all, “Hey, we’re A-okay, don’t mind us, the building’s on fire, we’re perfectly happy to, pretend we’re getting along. Then some guys invent time travel.
But the surprising spin that actually woke me up to this show: every portal is guarded by monsters. Thousands of them. Nightmare guards preventing any chance of a past rewrite. And of course, humanity does what humanity does best: it goes into an absolute tantrum and kills everything in sight. Very us. Very on brand.
They win, blast through the portals, feeling utterly pleased with themselves, until they realize they’ve been battling themselves the entire time. “Future versions, past versions—temporal echoes—doesn’t matter. They were the monsters. They protected the timeline from their own interference. And in doing that, they destroyed everything.” By destroying themselves, they’ve ruined everything. “The past. The present. The future—all gone. Just an endless echo spinning in the void.”
“It’s properly bleak.” But also? “Kind of perfect.”
Carlos Martín (guitar), Mario Vico (drums), and Iván Martín (bass) – this is the virtuoso power trio thing that has the potential to sound like a ton even with only three blokes playing the instruments. There’s something about the setup that pushes all participants to try harder and take up more space on the soundstage. No-one to rely on for backup with the synths and/or the second guitar. You’re out there naked; you better be good then.
They are.
The tracklist is like a pretentious literature course reading list—’The Hollow Clock,’ Temporal Divide’,’ Event Horizon’—the kind of titles that immediately puts you on your guard. And then you hear the music and realize they’ve earned the right to be pretentious. It’s not just some pose to display virtuosity. The structure is in keeping with the narrative: Act I (Awakening), Act II (Fracture), Act III (Resonance of Eternity, because subtlety is for losers).”
‘Through The Wormhole’ is exactly what you expect from a song called ‘Through The Wormhole’—disorienting, precise, the musical equivalent of your brain struggling to comprehend dimensions it wasn’t evolved to handle. ‘Paradox’ is indeed a paradox, which defies logic. ‘Where Future Collapses’ captures the realization that something has been royally messed up, and there’s no turning back.
Then there’s ‘Before We Ever Were’ with Göran Edman, who has toured with Yngwie Malmsteen and John Norum, so obviously he has a degree in bombastic metal with emotions. The band reports being thrilled to work with him, that he was immediately on board with what they’re doing, and that he has a fantastic voice, all of which is no doubt marketing nonsense, except you can really hear that he does. He has a melancholy and gigantic voice singing about things that should have never existed.
It gets complicated here. Mario Vico contributed drums to an album about the cyclical patterns of time, about actions resonating in all directions, about humankind battling itself out of fear. And then he died. Unexpected. Sudden. Not that anyone had a chance to listen to it yet.
This is what we mean by listening to music about the inescapability of consequence written by a voice that is no longer with us but remains. Now, the drums, these drums of Mario, are the beat of time in the course of all of this. ‘Pulse Of Time’ literally marks the second track. Every beat is him. Every rhythm is a recording of a voice that isn’t here but is right there in your ear.
Time is not a line, the record asserts. Time is a circle. Past, present, and future are the same thing, and maybe there is a truth in that which I had not predicted. Playing is a thing in the present of recording, and he is gone, and he is here, which is both true, and a cruel twist on the nature of time.
Take away the sci-fi accoutres and beneath lies a story about consequences. A civilization makes decisions, ignores the end result of those choices, and then is shocked and bewildered when things go wrong. We’ve seen it before, we’re seeing it now, and we will do it again in the future. It’s almost a hallmark of our particular species.
The question posed in this album: what if what we do when we try and fix our errors is actually the error itself? The error itself could be what we’re creating with interference, and we might be the monsters that protect the timeline from us.
It’s a question that resonates in 2026, when we’re all very, very busy with our acts of feigned indifference towards various global disasters, not to mention our simultaneous public freaking out on social media. The dissonance here is truly amazing. We know that things are broken. We half-heartedly attempt to repair them. We mainly just argue with each other about who’s to blame for the problem. This is a lot of “fighting ourselves through time portals” for my taste.
But it doesn’t end in despair. ‘Event Horizon’ – the final piece – gives a glimmer of hope. Maybe we could get to the event horizon of a black hole and fix things then. Maybe it would all just loop around again. Circle. No beginning or end.
“The hope isn’t in fixing everything. The hope is in the maybe. In still asking the question.”
“Mankind” is a prog metal concept album that is, amazingly, about something, performed by a group of musicians who can truly play, laid out in a manner that is, in fact, supposed to be there, and placed out there in a circumstance that adds a level of profundity despite what the band intended. It is technically skilled but not unreadably so, ambitious but not unintelligible, and, well, sad.
Martin Templum Domini had a drummer named Mario Vico. They do not anymore. They put the album out anyway because that is what you do. You share what they created. You let it resonate through time.
The records’ theme is that time is a circle, that there are consequences to actions that we can’t or won’t see, that human beings are destroying themselves in an attempt to save ourselves,” she goes on in explanation of what her music is about. “It is also a story of three musicians in Barcelona who are making something greater than they are that one of them won’t get to see what happens after.”
“Time is not a line. Time is a circle. And this album will keep spinning.”
TRACKLISTING:
Act I – The Awakening
01.Overture(From the ashes of the past to the Future)
02.Pulse Of Time(The discovery of the non-linear nature of time —the eternal pulse that connects everything.)
03. The Hollow Clock(The symbol of time shattered, hollow, stripped of linear meaning. Nothing is as we once knew it.)
04. Through The Wormhole(The beginning of time travel, crossing through space and time.)
Act II – The Fracture Of Time
05. Paradox (The travelers discover that their very presence creates contradictions the universe cannot sustain.)
06 . Temporal Divide (Humanity stands divided across time —a rift between what once was and what will be.)
07 . Where Future Collapses (The future crumbles as a consequence of present and past actions. Humanity realizes it has fought against itself, driven only by fear of the unknown.)
Act III – Echoes of the Eternety
08. Mankind (Humanity has destroyed everything: past, present, and future. It is time to fight for life itself.)
09. Before We Ever Were (Featuring Göran Edman) (A melancholic look at what should never have existed.)
10. Echoes (Resonances of what once was —fragments of lost voices through time, striving to mend what
was broken.)
11. Event Horizon (The final vestige of hope —or damnation. A horizon without humanity. If we could create a black hole and reach the event horizon, could we correct our mistakes… or would it all begin again?)
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