The fifth Non Est Deus studio album begins with a confession. Prayer I addresses God directly, admitting sin in thought, word, deed, action, and omission before asking for mercy. It would be easy to mistake the opening for devotional music if the project name did not already answer it: Non Est Deus, “there is no God.” Blessings and Curses, released April 3, 2026 through Noisebringer Records, spends the next forty minutes making those two voices occupy the same record.
Non Est Deus is one of the projects of the German musician who works as Noise, also known for Kanonenfieber and Leiþa. Noisebringer describes Blessings and Curses as the project’s fifth studio album and says it uses motifs and narratives from the Old and New Testaments to connect Catholic religious practice with contemporary social reality. All instruments, lyrics, mixing, and mastering are credited to Noise; Hans performs the live drums, and Tuomas Koivurinne created the artwork.
The record’s architecture is more precise than the old version of this review suggested. There are three pieces named “Prayer,” but only “Prayer II” and “Prayer III” are instrumental. “Prayer I” contains the opening confession. Between them sit eight full songs, each of which ends by identifying a biblical passage: Deuteronomy, Matthew, 1 Thessalonians, Psalms, Isaiah, Numbers, Matthew again, and Acts. The device matters because Noise does not need to invent an external theological vocabulary for the album. He builds his criticism out of language presented as sacred authority.
“Show Mercy” establishes the method. Its speaker asks God for guidance through a morally divided landscape and then closes with Deuteronomy 30:19-20, the passage that sets life and death, blessing and curse, before Israel. That scriptural choice gives the album its title. Doomnation’s reading is that the song turns the biblical demand to choose into a pressure point: guidance and coercion begin to occupy the same language. The passage itself does not make that argument. The song’s arrangement and framing do.
“The Forsaken” narrows the conflict to unanswered prayer. The lyric draws directly on Psalm 22, beginning from abandonment and moving through humiliation, bodily distress, and silence. Here the source is especially effective because the psalm is already a text of complaint spoken from inside faith. Noise does not have to convert belief into disbelief. He only has to hold the unanswered address in place long enough for the absence of response to become the song’s central event.
“Kora” is more confrontational. It retells Numbers 16 from the perspective of rebellion against Moses and then shifts into the punishment. The biblical episode contains two distinct acts that should not be collapsed: the earth opens and swallows the rebel households, while fire consumes the 250 men offering incense. The song preserves both images and ends with the phrase “God is good.” The force of that ending comes from juxtaposition. It is Noise’s editorial construction, not a neutral summary of the biblical chapter.
“The Sacrifice” uses Matthew 10:34-39, where Jesus speaks of a sword rather than peace, division within families, the demand to value discipleship above kinship, and the paradox of losing life in order to find it. Noise places that language beside his own vocabulary of transaction and compulsion. The result is one of the album’s clearest examples of scripture and commentary being deliberately difficult to separate on first listen.
That distinction becomes essential on “The Indulgence.” The song describes indulgence as a financial bargain in which fear, guilt, and money are exchanged for forgiveness. That is the song’s polemic, not an accurate definition of Catholic doctrine. In Catholic teaching, an indulgence concerns remission of temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven. The late-medieval history is more complicated: money and almsgiving became entangled with indulgence campaigns, and Martin Luther’s 1517 theses attacked the claims of indulgence preachers, the confidence placed in letters of indulgence, and the extraction of money from believers. His criticism was directed at concrete abuses and theological claims, not at a simple Church doctrine that sin itself could officially be bought away.
The biblical passage cited at the end of “The Indulgence,” Acts 8:18-20, is also not a passage about indulgences. It concerns Simon attempting to buy spiritual power from the apostles. Noise uses it analogically, as a biblical precedent for money entering a sacred transaction. That move is artist interpretation. Once identified as such, it becomes more interesting than the false historical shorthand, because the song is not documenting medieval practice. It is assembling a case against the commodification of salvation.
Musically, Blessings and Curses is built for repetition at scale. Choruses are broader than on some earlier Non Est Deus material, guitar lines return quickly, and the vocal phrases are often shaped to be remembered after one pass. The production gives those hooks enough space to carry in a large room without losing the compressed feel of a project still constructed around one principal writer and performer. That tension works particularly well after “Prayer II,” where “Transgression,” “Kora,” and “The Sacrifice” arrive as a more tightly connected run.
The same accessibility can flatten parts of the first half. Once the pattern of verse, large refrain, biblical citation, and renewed attack becomes clear, some songs reveal their destination early. The conceptual structure is rigorous, but musical predictability occasionally makes the scripture feel like a closing device rather than a destabilizing intrusion. The album is strongest when the cited text changes how the song before it is heard.
The project name makes the numbering problem in the Psalms worth stating correctly. In the traditional Latin Vulgate, Psalm 13 begins with Dixit insipiens in corde suo: non est Deus, the fool saying in his heart that there is no God. In the Hebrew or Masoretic numbering followed by most modern Bibles, including the US Catholic NABRE, the same text is Psalm 14:1. The difference comes from the older Septuagint and Vulgate numbering tradition, which numbers a substantial part of the Psalter one lower than the Masoretic sequence. So “Non Est Deus” is both Psalm 13:1 and Psalm 14:1 depending on the textual numbering system being used.
That detail suits the album better than an unqualified citation ever did. Blessings and Curses is built from religious language whose authority depends partly on transmission, translation, numbering, interpretation, and institutional use. Noise’s strongest move is not simply to declare that faith is false. It is to take language from inside Christian and biblical traditions, arrange it beside accusation, and force the listener to notice who is speaking at each moment. The record’s criticism becomes sharper when Doomnation keeps those voices separate too.
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