ALBUM REVIEW: Through The Dying Light – Lesotho
It’s always scary when a new band gets your hopes up. When Boston-based instrumental post-metal trio LESOTHO released their superb debut EP Summer Wars in 2021, we gushed about their “cathartic and challenging music” but questioned whether they’d be able to produce the same emotional intensity across a full-length album as they did in those four songs. Fortunately, we didn’t have long to wait at all, as Through The Dying Light is here to answer that question with a great big, emphatic ‘yes, they can’.
Through The Dying Light comprises 10 songs across roughly 50 minutes – more than double the length of that debut EP – which really allows the band to open the tanks and see what they can do on the open roads. Right away, with The Difficulty Of Crossing A Field, LESOTHO show that they know how to take their time. They’re not here to rush anything, and they spend these first three minutes methodically drawing out every bit of atmosphere on their own time because they know that it’s worthy of yours.
If the first song is all about setting the scene, Crown Of Echoes follows with a sumptuously cinematic dramatic flair that bowls you over and buries you in reverb. Mournful and morose, it doles out the melancholy and aims straight for your heart before soaring for the stratosphere, climbing toward a spine-tingling conclusion. Truth carries that epiphanic energy onward with a clarity and purpose that’s hard to pin down. It could be down to the mixing and production that has the guitars ringing out and the bass rumbling below crystalline waves of cymbals and snares, all playing an equal part and sharing that spotlight together. But the core reason that Through The Dying Light is such a triumph – even in these early stages – is as simple as this: LESOTHO are elite songwriters, from the structure and timing, to the tone and after effects.
Running Down The Sides displays a harder edge to their sound, crashing and crunching through a deluge of riffs. Meanwhile, the double-barrelled emotional blast of Flicker and Floater provides a refuge of hope and wonder in the heart of the album, pairing twinkling guitar lines and crushing drums with wrought tension, before capping it all off with a spoken word performance full of mystery and magic. “In the unending field of one wolf’s vision, I’m a flicker now and then a floater… One wolf stands, unblinking, distant supernovas winking in her celestial pupils.” For the only vocal element on the album, these words leave a suitably lasting impression and imprint on you from the moment you hear them.
As is often the case with instrumental post-metal, this is an album that can mean whatever you want it to mean; devoid of lyrics and voices, the guitar, bass and drums whisper, scream, sigh and exclaim all on their own. But rather than feeling like ‘just another’ post-metal band, LESOTHO have a tone and register all of their own, gorgeously realised and exquisitely expressed. For them to have not only written a debut album like this, but to have done it in just their third year of being, is a mark few can match.
It’s always scary when a new band gets your hopes up. But with Through The Dying Light, LESOTHO have given us one of the most emotional, stirring and moving post-metal albums of recent years. With just one album, it may be a bit soon to place them amongst the likes of PIJN, CASPIAN and PELICAN, but they’re well on their way. Give it a few years and we could be looking at LESOTHO as new contenders for the post-metal crown. This is a dazzling achievement of an album.
Rating: 9/10
Through The Dying Light is out now via self-release.
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