ALBUM REVIEW: A Single Flower – We Lost The Sea

July 7, 2025 Adam Robertshaw

A lot has happened for WE LOST THE SEA since 2019’s Triumph And Disaster was released. That album was extremely well received, almost as well as its predecessor, Departure Songs. But shortly after its release, the world collapsed into pandemic, conflict and… well, everything else. WE LOST THE SEA have been hard at work in the intervening years, responding to the shit show by crafting an expensive album that feels like an instrumental representation of six years worth of ups and downs. All the trials, tribulations, the pain, despair and hopefulness documented via 70 minutes of cinematic post rock.

Even though it consists of just six tracks, A Single Flower is well over an hour long. The final track Blood Will Have Blood takes up a whopping 27 minutes alone. And yet it demands to be listened to as a whole piece in a single sitting. If you can find a big enough gap in your day though, it’s well worth your time. As you’d expect from a gargantuan post-rock opus composed by one of the most talented bands currently active within the genre, A Single Flower is intended to take the listener on an emotional and spiritual journey.

It’s a journey of two halves, with the first three tracks conjuring up feelings of tension, despair and dread. Opener If They Had Hearts revolves around a repeated, nerve fraying riff that underpins pretty much the entire song while buzzsaw lead lines and keys build around it to breaking point. A Dance With Death is similarly tense, with its skin crawling main riff and machine gun snare fills as well as a haunting strings breakdown giving way to an anxiety-inducing crescendo. Then there’s Everything Here Is Black And Binding with its industrial clank and clamour.

The production in this first suite is intentionally raw. Aside from the layers of background atmospherics, the bulk of the instrumentation, first guitar and drums especially, are left mostly untreated and free from your typical levels of reverb and other effects you’d expect from a post rock band. The result is a claustrophobic listening experience; it feels like your sat in the middle of the room as the band performs around you, but the walls are closing in as they do so.

At A Single Flower’s mid-point with the 13 minute keystone track Bloom (Murmurations at First Light), however, it’s like a door is opened revealing a lush, sun-kissed glade and the atmosphere for the rest of the record is one of hope. From here on in everything is much more widescreen, the guitars drenched in effects, the melodies more delicate. In some of the lead lines deployed on Bloom, it feels like this track could even serve as a sequel to the band’s breakthrough single A Gallant Gentleman.

The Gloaming serves as an absolutely beautiful interlude, the instrumentation stripped back to just a gentle piano refrain accompanied by soaring strings provided by GOD SPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR‘s Sophie Trudeau. The aforementioned half hour long closing track could probably warrant a whole review of its own – shorter albums have been released this year alone – but for the purposes of brevity let’s just say it’s a sprawling epic that encompasses everything great about post-rock. Granted there are those who simply can’t sit through a song with such an extended run time but the initiated will surely find it so rewarding.

While the ten year celebration of Departure Songs may have the spotlight for now, with the band booked to perform it in full at this year’s ArcTanGent festival, the attention is sure to shift to A Single Flower once WE LOST THE SEA’s fans get hold of it.

Rating 9/10