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Some closing tracks wrap things up. “Voi Nu Simțiți La Fel?” doesn’t seem interested in that. Symphress end their third album, Serpentine, on a question. The title translates to “Don’t You Feel the Same?” and the song stays honest about not having the answer.
The Cluj-Napoca band have been at this since 2015. They started as an acoustic-ambient project and went full progressive and symphonic metal soon after. Two albums later, Father Time – Part I in 2023 and Pseudo in 2024, people in Romania started calling them a “prog revival.” That’s a heavy tag to carry. Serpentine is them refusing to sit still under it.
The rollout itself is unusual. Instead of dropping the record in one go, they’ve released it piece by piece across 2025 and 2026, a single at a time. So this closer arrives with weeks of context already built around it. Kind of a slow-burn reveal, honestly.
War With the Self
The band describes the song as a portrait of someone fighting themselves. Trapped inside, detached, numbed by the world around them. One line, in their own translation, says that world “made me a toreador of longings that won’t let me sleep.” That’s a great image. A bullfighter, but the bull is everything you want and can’t stop wanting. It’s dramatic, sure. Metal is allowed to be dramatic.
What I like more is where it lands. The band says the song builds to a quiet, unresolved last line: “Sper pentru tine,” or “I hope for you.” After all that inner conflict, the final words point outward, at someone else. Not a victory. Just hope, handed over. Ending a whole album there is a brave call.
Radu Alexandru guests on the track. He’s known from DinUmbră and Váthos, and Váthos have shared stages with Symphress on the Serpentine tour, so this feels less like a name on a sticker and more like friends finishing something together.
Singing It in Romanian
Serpentine is sung entirely in Romanian. For a band pitched at fans of Nightwish, Dream Theater and Opeth, that’s a choice with a cost. English would travel easier. They went with the language the feelings actually live in, and I respect that a lot. If you don’t speak it, the translations do the job, and the toreador line hits either way.
The band also says this record opens up toward alternative metal, heavier and more direct, while holding onto the symphonic and progressive side. With seven members, including two lead vocalists in Andrada Hofmeister and Sergiu Botezatu, they’ve got the people to pull both directions at once.
The live story backs it up too. Celtic Transilvania for a third time this summer, first runs at Barock Fest and Rock Revolution Bobâlna, and a spot in the finals of Posada Rock, one of the country’s oldest band competitions. These guys play out. A lot.
So does the question land? Only one way to find out. Give Voi Nu Simțiți La Fel? a spin and decide if you feel the same.
