Vaelthunder is M. Pires on his own in Lisbon, working around metalcore, sludge and post-hardcore after his years playing bass in The Voynich Code. His sole studio album under the name, “Expose / Exist”, was pieced together across roughly a decade, with riffs going back to 2013 and lyrics later dealing with content, algorithms, disinformation and the constant pressure to stay visible. When it was finally finished, Pires had spent three or four years barely posting online, so getting the record heard meant going straight back into the same feeds he had been writing about.
“I made an album exposing the feed, and it will mostly have to live on the feed to be heard.”
That problem arrived very late in a record that had spent most of its life without a release plan. For a good chunk of those ten years, Pires had stepped away from creating altogether and was mostly listening. He found music he would probably have missed before and gradually stopped measuring his own writing by how technical or difficult it was.
“I absorbed a lot, found things I wouldn’t have found otherwise, and somewhere in there I let go of the idea that everything had to be technical or difficult to play to be good enough to release. Those are metrics you impose on yourself when you’re trying to stand out.”
The change makes sense beside his past. The Voynich Code were his first semi-professional band, and Pires came from a part of metal where technical ability carried plenty of weight. With Vaelthunder, he became more comfortable with the limits of his time, concentration and playing.
“Getting older gave me some clarity about that. Knowing where my limits are, understanding that the time and focus you actually have will change how you write, and accepting that not everything has to be virtuosic.”
Some of “Expose / Exist” predates The Voynich Code anyway. The first rough ideas go back to 2013, when Pires was jamming with T. Silva and C. Galante from his first band, Thirteen Degrees To Chaos. A full band never came out of those sessions, but some of the riffs followed him. Silva and Galante both ended up in the thank-you notes.
The oldest actual recording that survived onto the album comes from 2015. Pires later posted that original riff on Instagram.
After that, dates get messy. Some parts lived on old rehearsal recordings for years. Others were written much later when an existing song needed another section.
“The record wasn’t written song by song, year by year, which is probably why the question is hard for me. Some riffs came out of old rehearsal recordings that had been sitting in a drawer for years waiting for their place. Others were written while I was already recording, and those are less spontaneous and more intentional, made to close sections for instance.”
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There was no deadline hanging over any of this. Pires stopped working on it for long stretches, returned when he wanted to, and did not know for much of the process whether anyone would ever hear it.
“The good part is that I wrote it with no expectations, no deadlines, and no idea whether it would ever come out. It just kept happening.”
That looseness carried into the music itself. The record moves through metalcore, slower sludge sections, hardcore movement and short quieter passages. Pires uses Converge, Cave In and Every Time I Die as reference points, though his own description is broader: “eclectic within metal”. “Light / Leak” is only 1:05, while closer “Hello, Anaesthesia” runs 5:13. In between, songs move around enough that he is comfortable with the possibility that the album “fits in a lot of places and belongs to none of them.”
“What I wanted was to play a lot of different things, whatever I was feeling at the time, without planning for any of it to fit in a box.”
A decade also gave those reference points time to change.
“Trends changed, what people listen to inside metal changed. Some of my references stopped playing altogether. Others came back with different clothes on, in new bands. That kept giving me openings to bring in things I wouldn’t have thought of at the start.”
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The lyrics arrived in two much clearer batches.
Six were written during or around the 2020 lockdown period: “Sub Scribed”, “Congratulations, You Win”, “Fake Smiles and Holy Water”, “The Hassle Show”, “Light / Leak” and “Hello, Anaesthesia”. Pires was already fed up with social media by then. He stopped posting and watched influencer culture, live-streaming and the casual access people now had to other people’s lives get harder to ignore.
“Sub Scribed” deals with bodies being turned into content and intimacy becoming a transaction. “Congratulations, You Win” goes after the self-improvement business and the promise of a prize that was never really there. “Fake Smiles and Holy Water” looks at sameness sold as community, including people consuming on command and people tailoring themselves to what the algorithm will sell.
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“The Hassle Show” moves into humiliation and the audience around it. The people watching and judging are part of what keeps the spectacle going. “Light / Leak” comes from scrolling past lives that appear permanently healthy, successful and moving forward. “Hello, Anaesthesia” follows that anxiety into consumption, using buying and consuming as a way to switch off from everything still waiting to be dealt with.
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Pires finished the last three sets of lyrics in 2025, by which point his attention had shifted further towards disinformation and extremism.
“Others were finished much closer to the end, at a point where extremism and natural stupidity seemed to be scaling faster than artificial intelligence. There was a lot to say by then.”
“Among Borrowed Tongues” is about old oppressive ideas finding fresh language and then spreading through people who are themselves being manipulated. The album opens with lines about people who “trade quiet for certainty” and “speak with borrowed tongues”, before moving through distorted language, convenient versions of truth and responsibility nobody wants to claim.
“Hollow Passenger” goes directly at the way disinformation can feed on the attention spent fighting it. Pires was interested in what happens when every correction, argument and angry response gives the original thing another round of visibility.
When he first sent the track over, he summed it up as “the uncomfortable idea that refusing to look might be the sharper weapon.”
“Leave it unheeded,
It dwindles to dust.
Feed it with fervor,
It blossoms in trust.”
Pires followed that thought with a line that ended up saying plenty about the whole release process too: “Which is an argument against attention, and here I am asking for some.”
The “Hollow Passenger” visualizer adds another odd detail. Its footage was generated by AI, with Pires handling the editing and post-production himself. All nine songs have their own visual piece, and “Among Borrowed Tongues” got a full music video.
“All Adrift” is the outlier among the 2025 lyrics. It is the most personal song on the record and also the quietest. Two people still love each other, but exhaustion, too much stimulation and too little time keep getting in the way of communication. Pires links it to the same overload running through the rest of the album, only brought down to the level of a relationship.
The wider frustration is not limited to what people post. Pires also became increasingly irritated by the way music itself gets pushed through the same systems.
“Recognition has replaced listening. A song has become something you consume in five seconds from a trend, a clip or a face that isn’t the artist’s, rather than something you sit with. Reach has never been higher and attention has never been thinner. And that is fucking wrong.”
He continued: “Expose / Exist is a record about that machine, inevitably made and released inside it. What I can do is not perform for it. I’d like the record to outlive those five seconds of attention.”
For Pires, finishing the recordings alone was not enough. He needed to put them somewhere other people could actually hear them.
“What I realised somewhere along the way is that for the record to exist, and for the process to feel finished in my head, it had to be shared and heard. That’s what I’m doing now. It also goes against my nature, because putting myself out there isn’t something I enjoy.”
That became awkward for another reason. The network he had during The Voynich Code years had mostly gone cold.
The Voynich Code put him in contact with people working at a level he had not experienced before. Matt from Hold Tight PR helped the band into Metal Hammer a couple of times, including a compilation, and helped them get onto UK Tech-Fest. Bands and media people Pires met around UK Tech-Fest opened other doors later. There were contacts with promoters and media in Portugal too.
Pires also spent time in a Portuguese DIY collective putting on shows. Some people from that circle are still active and, in his words, influential. He lost touch with most of them.
“I learned a lot from The Voynich Code days, since it was the first time I was in a semi-professional band, and I met people who probably don’t even remember me now; that’s mostly on me, because I keep a low profile and I’m terrible at staying in touch.”
A lot of bands he once played with stopped. Some former members stayed around music in different roles or joined bigger bands. Pires remained connected to people on social media, but after three or four years of hardly posting, suddenly turning up with something to promote did not come easily.
“It feels awkward to me to show up out of nowhere and start spamming.”
He is clear about his own part in losing those connections. There is no complaint here about somebody shutting him out. He stopped keeping up with people, stayed quiet for years and then found himself having to build contacts again when the album was ready.
“At the beginning I thought about bringing other musicians in to help me get the vision across.”
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That plan faded too. People had work and lives to deal with, time was harder to find, and some musicians he might once have asked were no longer playing. Eventually Vaelthunder became entirely his record.
“So at some point I decided this was going to be my record, made my way, in my own time.”
The physical setup changed repeatedly along the way.
Pires always wrote and recorded at home, but he moved house three times after 2015. The studio went from a normal bedroom with basic recording equipment to a properly treated room where he could turn up his old Peavey 6505. The amp itself is not on the finished record, though a lot of the riffs were written with it.
Later he bought an Axe-FX and moved fully into a digital setup. His routine changed with it. Earlier writing meant plugging into a half-stack while it was still early enough in the evening to make noise. Later sessions happened at the desk, on headphones, late at night.
He also added a digital drum kit.
“I’m not a drummer – at all!”
It was good enough for knocking out simple rhythm structures. He would then programme the parts and fills he had in his head, mostly through trial and error.
The guitars kept changing too. Pires jokes that “GAS is real”, and some older sections had been recorded with different guitars and pickups. To keep the finished album consistent, he went back and tracked parts again with the same setup. Sometimes that meant polishing a riff or changing a detail while he was already there.
“It was a pretty unstructured process. I stepped away from it for long stretches more than once, since it was mostly a creative endeavour, not something I had strict deadlines or goals for, so even the dates got blurry along the way.”
Studio photos from 2018 and 2023 document two points in that long process. Both were taken by Pires. The artist photo is credited to C. Pires.
By release time, “Expose / Exist” had nine tracks and a total runtime of 34:06. “Sub Scribed” came out first on August 14, followed by “Fake Smiles and Holy Water” on August 21. The full album arrived independently on September 4 together with the “Among Borrowed Tongues” video.
Pires wrote, produced and recorded the album, mixed the vocals and made the artwork. A. Afonso at Titan Wave Studios handled mixing and mastering, along with additional drum production.
The digital version is already there regardless of what happens next. The vinyl is listener-backed, so the physical pressing only exists if enough people decide to fund it.
Pires has also been unusually definite about the future of the name. “Expose / Exist” is billed as the first and last Vaelthunder record. He has not given a reason for that decision.
Ten years earlier, none of this had a deadline, a release plan or even a guarantee of becoming an album.
“It just kept happening.”
