MAYBESHEWILL

No Feeling is Final ROBOT NEEDS HOME

First album in five years from reunited UK post-rockers.

No Feeling Is Final could just as easily describe Maybeshewill themselves as the material here. The veteran Leicester post-rockers bowed out in 2016, two years after their supposedly final album, Fair Youth. They’ve played one-off shows in the interim, though, and as a result their parting has felt like more of a hiatus than a genuine break-up. So when the bandmembers started individually sketching out new ideas, it was inevitable that they would gravitate toward one another to flesh them out, ultimately resulting in a new Maybeshewill record.

Informed by what they describe as “weary exasperation” with the current environmental and political crises, No Feeling Is Final could easily have been a bleak affair. Yet the band say they wanted to write an album that addressed these issues, while also creating something hopeful and cathartic. Consequently, there’s an air of defiance rather than despair in the mood here. In terms of sonics, arrangements and layering, it picks up where Fair Youth left off. It’s not a straight continuation though, even if atmosphere and grandiosity are still very much the name of the game. Several tracks, such as Zarah and Invincible Summer, are more immediate than the cinematic direction they had been taking the first time around. Moreover, among the pounding drums and walls of sound, there’s a lightness, a heroic motif intended to carry the listener along.

Elsewhere, highlights include the sprawling Refuturing, which peaks in excellence, if not in volume, in an instrumental decrescendo about two-thirds of the way through. Cyclical piano figures take over, carrying the track to its close with a morphing piano cascade, offset by haunting saxophone.

The Last Hours, meanwhile, feels like an electronic track reimagined with organic instruments. Hi-hat clicks and glitches are instead created with ticking, multilayered percussion, and synthesiser pads are replaced with tight string swells. The track inevitably finds release in a visceral and urgent rush of guitars and drums, but it’s that initial groove that grabs the attention most.

The only real weakness of the album is that it’s a very gentle development of the band’s sound. There’s a tendency to stack layers such that certain textures, like strings, or piano, are predictable in when they enter or leave a track. This is why Refuturing and The Last Hours stick out so much. For existing fans, that’s likely a good thing, particularly for those that enjoyed their later material. However, whether or not

No Feeling Is Final will bring new listeners into the fold remains to be seen.

ATMOSPHERE AND GRANDIOSITY ARE STILL THE NAME OF THE GAME.