I Still Believe In Us - Long Hallways (2021)

This was on a post-rock best of 2021 list, and with good reason. This exercise is making me realize that I listen to more post-rock than i would have thought I did, but that’s a different subject.

Something that turns me off, especially on the post-metal end of post-rock, is the tendency to repetition. Banging on one or two chords for five minutes on end just makes me yawn. And even when there’s more complexity, the standard guitar-bass-drums instrumentation can only go so far before I’m done with it.

Long Hallways avoids all of these problems. There are lots of synths, horns, and even strings (real or sampled, i can’t really tell) to keep things interesting. The rhythms are varied and the tone stays light, never getting to goth-kid-quoting-shakespeare levels of seriousness to which the genre is sometimes given.

It’s a nice breath of fresh air, a record that’s part of a scene, but distinct from it as well.

tracks I liked

The Spell That Freed You - soaring horns, great build and release dynamic
Forgotten Magic - slow and majestic
Somehow Without - driving without droning