genres: indie rock + post-hardcore + experimental
While the slow release of music around the holidays can sometimes be a bit of a drag, it gives a good opportunity to go back through the previous year’s releases and see what I missed – which is how I came across this one. I completely missed this album from early 2021 until this week. Ourfathers is a pretty obscure band that’s only released one full length (so far?) and not updated any of their social media since that 2018 release, so I really wasn’t expecting anything new. While it may be brief, this EP is incredibly dense in every way. The band plays a style sitting somewhere in between the aggressive indie rock of bands like My Epic or Thrice and the progressive post-hardcore of early A Lot Like Birds or Hail The Sun. It’s an interesting hybrid of fairly raw and organic production and lots of technical musicianship and non-traditional flair – a latin guitar riff here, a few measures of horns there – that’s quite similar to a faster paced version of recent Trophy Eyes. Lyrically, the project continues to cryptically explore themes of ancestry (both personal and cultural), though turns inward to spend the bulk of all four tracks wrestling with psychological and religious issues. The brevity of the release works exceedingly well, as the amount of attention the EP requires is much more manageable at 20 minutes as opposed to the nearly 75 minutes of their previous album. If the band continues to release further projects, this format is a huge success on every level, and one of the best gems I’ve stumbled across from 2021.
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