Bandcamp Track three is called “Integrate” and track four is called “Dissociate”. On a record the band describe as moving through trauma toward integration, that order is backwards, and it is the most deliberate thing about Wilderness.
The two songs share a lyric. In “Integrate” it runs “Floating in circles / Trying to see your back / And every life you left behind”, spoken to someone else, by a voice that promises “I’ll take away your pain”. In “Dissociate” the same image comes back as “I’ll stop running in circles / Trying to see my back / And every life I left behind”. Second person becomes first. The rescuer and the person being rescued turn out to be one body, and the album puts the comforting version first so that the collapse afterwards lands as a relapse rather than a starting point. Anyone who has been told they are doing better will recognise the sequence.
Freya Brown writes the words, sings half of them, and painted the sleeve, and the sleeve is the record in one image: a pale deer standing in a blue wood while its own outline unravels into hundreds of threads that wrap back around it. “Nervosa” opens the album from inside that tangle, all phantom hands and counting ribs to get to sleep, and the title does the rest of the work without the lyric ever naming the illness. “The Guide” is the strangest piece here and the best written, a scene of sunburned meadows and insect hymns where something offers a bargain in quotation marks, “We promise to love you back / If we can give you everything / And take nothing you have left”, and the answer that comes back is “I don’t deserve love / I carry this blame”. Codependency staged as a fairy tale, with the seduction given the prettier verse.
Musically this is the Alcest end of the family, wide clean passages that break into tremolo and blast, and Cairiss are unusually good at the break itself. “Integrate” is the shortest song on the record at three and a half minutes, spends its first hundred seconds on clean picking and a voice hung far back in the room, then floods completely. Putting the most violent shift on the shortest track, and calling that track “Integrate”, is the sharpest structural joke on the album. “Retrace” earns its eight and a half minutes with strings under the intro and an ending where a second voice answers the healer in quotation marks again, “He’ll catch your breath / But not what’s yours”. Lydia Williams and Freya Brown split the clean and harsh work, and the mix treats them differently on purpose: the cleans float on long reverb tails, the screams come dry and close, so the two are never in the same acoustic space even when they are in the same bar.
Ethan Bishop mixed and mastered it at ELM Studios and the dynamic range is the standout technical achievement, quiet parts left genuinely quiet, the peaks arriving with real headroom behind them rather than a master already pinned to the ceiling. The cost is consistent and worth naming: at maximum density the low mids fill in, and the bass, which spends most of the album as foundation rather than a voice with its own line, gets absorbed into the guitars exactly where the songs are heaviest. In this genre that thickness is partly the point, and it never sinks a passage, but it does mean the biggest moments are slightly less legible than the small ones.
“Wildfire” closes it and finally turns the title around. Everywhere else the wilderness is where the self comes apart. Here it is the destination, “The wildfires I can tame / And the wilderness I can find / When I leave the trail behind”, and the last line, “celebrate her life and mine”, opens a door the record does not walk through. Ten years between a three-track EP and this. It was worth the wait, and it is hard to think of another self-released debut this year that has this much structure holding it up.
The first thing you notice is space. This record was mixed to breathe, and the acoustic intros, the string passages and the clean vocal sections are left genuinely quiet instead of being lifted to match the loud parts, so when the band do come in they arrive with somewhere to go. Two vocal treatments run in parallel throughout: the clean voices sit far back on long reverb tails, the harsh ones come dry and forward, and keeping them in separate acoustic spaces is what stops the trade-offs from blurring. Guitars are dense and saturated with the tremolo lines still readable through the saturation, cymbals stay airy rather than sharp, and the kick keeps enough attack to be heard under blast sections. The recurring cost shows up on every track: at full density the lower middle fills in and the bass, which mostly works as a foundation rather than a melodic voice, gets pulled into the guitar wall. The heaviest passages carry enormous weight but slightly less detail than the quiet ones do.
Standout tracks: The Guide, Integrate, Retrace
