The 3rd wave of Post-Rock gets an unfair bad press by a lot of people by just being “Godspeed You! Black Emperor clones”, and while, true, GY!BE is way ahead of most of the bands they share the genre with, that doesn’t mean the genre itself is bad. Post-Rock is the perfect blend of Rock and Ambient, and it can give us the most beautiful and serene of songs. It can be dark, mellow, energetic… and while a lot of people say that most bands sound the same, there’s always bands like This Will Destroy You, 69daysofstatic and Dirty Three just to name some examples that give some unique twist on the genre.

Explosions in the Sky isn’t one of those bands, sadly, but EitS is one of the most famous bands of the genre in recent years, having launched their first album in 2000 and contributed to a lot of movie soundtracks.To me EitS fall in a weird spot, while some of their tracks are just my favorite in the entire genre, like “Your Hand in Mine” and “Remember Me As A Time of Day”, the few albums I’ve listened in full left me a bit… disappointed.

Today I was exactly in the mood for some Post-Rock though, and since I hadn’t listened to their latest album, The Wilderness, and it had been on my backlog since 2016, I grabbed a cup of tea and my aching headache and gave it a spin.

Thankfully, The Wilderness didn’t gave me the same feeling of disappointment as the others, and when my first listen was finished my headache had began to dissipate. There’s too many good tracks here, “Logic of a Dream”, “Disintegration Anxiety”, “Infinite Orbit”, just to name a few. To say that these are better than the other tracks I named before would be lying, at least in their first impressions, but that takes nothing from them, as they are all spectacular. “Logic of a Dream” is, specially, a good example of what this genre can do, building and shifting tone for the course of it’s 6 minutes and 38 seconds.”Disintegration Anxiety” then breaks the mellow feeling of the rest of the album, (that returns in force for the next track, the dark “Losing The Light”, don’t worry) for a more drum based song and delivers one of the most enjoyable tracks in the album.To worth mention is as well, is the dark wall of sound in the end of “Colours in Space”, which is just amazing and twisted when put together with the rest of the album.

Individual songs apart, this album gives you that beautiful sense of serenity that I mentioned previously. Perfect for when you just want to relax. Despite the title of the album, The Wilderness gives off a more spacey vibe, which is solidified in the actual song names. My overall feeling is that The Wilderness is, then, their most solid album I’ve heard so far, I can’t think of a bad track in it.