Bandcamp The Dublin duo behind this call what they do program music, which is a specific and slightly old-fashioned claim to make. Programme music tells you something outside itself: a river, a battle, a sleigh ride. It is the opposite of an instrumental band saying the songs mean whatever you want. It means the titles are load-bearing.
So read the six of them in order. “Stay Vigilant”. “The Introvert”. “Articles”. “The Town Beyond the Hills”. “Hollow”. “I Love You (You Know Where to Find Me)”.
That is a day in a year when nobody could go anywhere, told without a single word being sung. It opens in the language of public instruction, moves to the person that instruction suited a little too well, then to reading the news about it, then to somewhere unreachable over the horizon, then to what is left after all that, and it ends on a message you can only send rather than deliver. Twenty-four minutes, six pieces, no lyrics and no need for any.
The joke, if it is one, is saved for last. “I Love You (You Know Where to Find Me)” is a minute and forty-one seconds of tremolo picking and blast beats, the fastest and most violent thing here by a long way. The tenderest title on the record gets the harshest music, and it is the final word. You can read that as a gag about repressed feeling or as the sound of somebody shouting a sentiment down a phone line, and either way it lands better than a slow closer would have.
Saoirse Seeber plays guitar, bass and keys, Stuart Scully plays drums, and they met in a university jazz society over a shared enthusiasm for Mastodon and The Mars Volta. All three of those facts are audible. “Stay Vigilant” opens on percussive thumping and tapping figures with a lead tone smooth enough to be creamy, the bass tight and growling and locked to the kick, and everything legible at once, which at this playing speed is not a given. “Articles” hard-pans the rhythm guitars to opposite sides and gives the bass a genuinely distorted midrange, and “The Town Beyond the Hills” leans into gated, djent-adjacent precision before a wordless vocal line drifts in around the ninety-second mark, the only voice on the album and used as another instrument.
The reservation is consistent and it is about air. Five of the six tracks are mixed and mastered for modern loudness, cleanly and without audible artefacts, but with the dynamics squeezed flat enough that the quiet moments never get to be quiet. On a record whose subject is confinement that is almost thematically apt, and it is also the standard dialect of this kind of prog, so it is not a mistake. It is still a cost, and the album itself proves it.
“Hollow” is where they let go. The limiting backs off, the kit stops sounding assembled and starts sounding hit, the kick lands without a plastic click on the front of it and the snare has honest wood in it, and twin harmonised leads carry six and a half minutes without ever needing to shout. It is the best piece here and the only one with room to breathe, which on an album about being stuck indoors is either a happy accident or the smartest sequencing decision on it.
Bass is the other recurring cost: on “The Town Beyond the Hills” and the closer it retreats into pure sub duty and gives up the contour it clearly has on “Articles”. For a two-piece where one person plays it, that is a mixing choice rather than a limitation.
A debut from two people who clearly enjoy each other’s company, built on an idea most instrumental bands do not bother to have. If the follow-up gives more of it the space “Hollow” gets, the programme will come through even louder.
“Hollow” is the outlier and the most dynamic thing here: measured limiting, a kick with a clean attack and no plastic click on the front, a snare with real wood in it, and twin harmonised leads carrying the melody. “Articles” gives the bass the most character on the record, audibly distorted through the midrange rather than sitting under the kick. “Stay Vigilant” is the cleanest piece of engineering here, keeping percussive tapping figures, a creamy lead tone and a tight growling bass all separately readable at a tempo that usually smears at least one of them. The closer packs blast beats and fast tremolo into a hundred seconds and is the one place the cymbals edge toward sibilance.
Standout tracks: Hollow, Articles, I Love You (You Know Where to Find Me)
