Rupit enters public view carrying an entire mythology, with Bernardo van Bemmelen presenting music, fiction, photography and video as parts of the same project and placing Arnau at the centre of the spirit-world Jardí. NEU is the first album-length statement from that work, a debut expected to introduce its creator, establish a fictional setting and sustain forty-five minutes of music at once. For a first meeting, the amount of context is audacious and slightly ridiculous in an appealing way.

I expected the names and lore to become homework. Within one play, Arnau became the centre of my interest, leaving the map in a supporting role. His vulnerability gives Jardí a human scale, turning its corruption and supernatural disturbances into pressures that can be understood through fear, attachment and the gradual collapse of trust.

Van Bemmelen lets information arrive through damaged perception, so the listener meets Jardí through Arnau’s limited access to it. Events reach us as partial memories, overheard exchanges, repeated phrases and images charged with meaning long before their full context becomes available. The production participates in that uncertainty. Folk guitar, synthetic percussion, quiet ambience and sudden rock weight pass through abrupt edits and layers of digital erosion, with clean sounds frequently changing character while they play. A voice begins close to the ear, breaks into pieces and returns inside the rhythm; an acoustic detail offers warmth, then distortion roughens its edges. These choices carry dramatic value because each one changes our relationship with the narrator. The listener experiences Arnau’s confusion first and the mythology second, which gives the album emotional movement even when its plot becomes difficult to follow. Because NEU means snow in Catalan, the title initially struck me as attractive decoration attached to an already crowded concept. It earned a place through the album’s concern with altered visibility. Snow changes familiar ground, softens boundaries and reflects light with deceptive brightness, while Rupit reaches similar effects through haze, interference and sudden clearings in the mix. The degraded visual material surrounding the release extends the idea: memory passes through weather, technology and time, then returns carrying marks from each encounter.

The wide stylistic range works because van Bemmelen treats genre as a change in emotional temperature. Acoustic passages create proximity, electronic details disturb that closeness, and the heavier sections turn private anxiety into physical pressure. His voice sits at the centre of those changes, moving between storyteller, frightened participant and another piece of unstable sound. The point becomes clearest on Burning, where the arrangement gradually takes authority away from the narrator and forces his voice to struggle for space inside the growing intensity. That relationship between voice and production says much about NEU as a whole: Arnau tries to explain his world while the world continually interferes with the explanation. Elsewhere, brief dialogue and additional voices bring welcome social detail into a record heavily occupied by one person’s perception. Jardí gains credibility whenever somebody answers back.

My patience thinned during several of the busiest passages, especially when another vocal cut, rhythmic turn or layer arrived after the emotional point had already landed. Van Bemmelen occasionally gives every idea equal importance, and that generosity can flatten the distinction between awe, grief and danger. I wanted a firmer edit and greater separation between sections. A second listen complicated that complaint, since the crowded production also communicates the experience of a mind trying to process several realities at once. Even after that adjustment, some excess remains plain excess, though its presence reveals an artist discovering the limits of his own system in public. The rough seams carry evidence of ambition under pressure, and they give the debut a volatility that polished conceptual records often lose. The fictional world also creates an unusual distance from autobiography. Van Bemmelen can place personal vulnerability inside Arnau and examine it through invented events, giving painful material enough room to change form. My attention shifted from solving Jardí as a puzzle toward the way Arnau kept seeking closeness after every reason for caution had accumulated. Once that preference became clear, the album opened in a different direction. Its broken chronology and unstable imagery began to resemble the way people remember a crisis: one sentence survives perfectly, an entire week becomes fog, and a minor object carries the weight of an event.

NEU introduces Rupit as a multidisciplinary project with a crowded imagination, a strong visual identity and a genuine appetite for risk. Its mythology sometimes presses too heavily on the songs, while van Bemmelen’s production occasionally stretches an idea beyond its sharpest form. Those are substantial weaknesses, and they belong beside the record’s achievements. Establishing this much language at once is a bold task for any debut, and van Bemmelen gives his fictional architecture a recognisable emotional centre. Jardí attracted my curiosity, yet Arnau earned my attention. The distinction matters because worlds can expand indefinitely, while a character gets one chance to become human. On NEU, vulnerability makes that chance count.

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