I like to dive into debut albums headfirst. I read nothing, I know nothing, I expect nothing. The promo material comes as an afterthought, not to inform opinion, but to measure it. To see if I got close. This is the only competition I enter. I have never once in my life wanted to beat anyone at anything, except this. This small, private, entirely pointless game I play against a press release. Deadlines, laziness, weakness. Sometimes I read first, and that’s where it goes wrong. That’s where I hand myself a loaded gun and then act very surprised when it goes off, because what happens when you see some of your favourite names strung together in a single sentence? Explosions in the Sky. The National. Slowdive. La Dispute. Your chest does something. Your critical faculties, the careful distance you built, poof.
And so I step into the first Wildernesses album with the heavy burden of expectation on my shoulders, but the lightness of an open mind.
‘Sleepless’ opens Growth as an instrumental statement of intent, and it is cinematic and expansive in the way that only post-rock can be when done properly, almost romantic, which is not a word I expected to reach for two minutes into a song. God is an Astronaut came to mind, and I remembered it’s the feeling of watching something rather than just listening to it that made me fall in love with this genre to begin with. Then ‘Happy Hollow’ lands like an unexpected recalibration. When someone starts singing about the X-Files, you immediately detect they are roughly the same age as you, and something settles. There’s a millennial voice who has watched the same things, felt the same things, and is probably processing the same quiet ongoing disappointment of being this particular age at this particular time. This feels calamine from the inside out. Unhurried and indie leaning, with a soothing guitar tone, a bass that has decided it’s the main character and drums that sit in quite a deep register, Wildernesses take the tired bones of post-rock and rearrange them into something softer and warmer, a body where weight is distributed differently, with no singular moment tasked to carry everything.
Growth is not immediately catchy. It meanders with patience and subtle purpose. Songs share a certain temperature, a consistency of tone that walks a fine line between atmosphere and sameness, and depending on the day you’re having, it may not always stay on the right side of it. But sit with it and perspective shifts, as each track stops being part of a sequence and becomes a safety blanket, or a small room you can return to. Perhaps the album title does more heavy lifting than it first appears. Growth doesn’t tend to announce itself, and neither does this. ‘Dread’ injects the whole thing with energy at exactly the right time, proof that soft and heavy are not mutually exclusive, and the band understand both without picking favourites. ‘Terrible Bloom’ is a pull back into stillness, with a bass line that everything else simply follows naturally. And then this line arrives – “everything is beautiful and nothing hurts” – directed at you specifically, or so it feels. Do we read the same books. This is the kind of moment that makes you feel less alone in your references, and more convinced that this album knows exactly who it is addressing. Around track six, ‘Maintenance’, Growth pulls back into more familiar post-rock territory, with mellifluous duelling guitars doing what they were built to do, and doing it confidently.
I was on a train, making notes whilst listening, not really paying attention to song titles, when I wrote down: the time has finally come to feel the warmth of the sun on your cheeks. The song was aptly titled ‘Summertime, 1917’. Whatever Wildernesses set out to accomplish, they did. Turns out the comparisons weren’t wrong as such, they just weren’t the point. I got close this time, I got close.