“Are we really too late?”
Australian post-rock band We Lost the Sea formed in 2007, with a vision to create brooding atmospheric post-rock. Their first album, Crimea, was released in 2009 – a dark and heavy meditation on the Crimean War, strongly influenced by Cult of Luna.
Released in 2012, their second album, The Quietest Place on Earth, is an enigmatic and sometimes mystical exploration of falling through life. Opening with a song reflecting on Joseph Kittinger’s free fall (“I gamble fate, abandon control, obey gravity”), and closing with a journey to the afterlife.
The final words on The Quietest Place on Earth are “Tonight I will sleep on the ocean bed”. And within a year of the album’s release, their singer Chris Torpy tragically took his own life.
Reeling from the emotions caused by suicide, the band were forced to significantly reimagine themselves. This process of emotional and musical exploration eventually birthed 2015’s Departure Songs – widely critically-acclaimed, and captures post-rock at its most tender.
2019’s Triumph and Disaster is a soundtrack to ecological collapse – moments of hope and reflection surrounded by brooding darkness. The album closes with “Mother’s Hymn“, a lament over the direction of our world, sang by then-expectant mother and climate change activist Louise Netting.
Between 2019 and now the world has changed rapidly. Post-covid and post-truth. Wars of words and bombs. Machines and maniacs. What once seemed secure is now shown to be an illusion.
So how does a band emerge from global tragedy?
In their release of A Single Flower, they state:
“The world lay wrecked before us, a quiet ruin of things lost and things that never were. The mornings came like the grinding of old gears, a slow turning toward some unknowable purpose. And yet, in the stillness of despair the nameless rose. Not for hope, nor for meaning, but because something in the marrow of our bones whispered that to rise was the only rebellion left.”
“To rise was the only rebellion left”. Unrelenting, raw passion. To prove our humanity in the age of heartless machines, we answer despair with rage.
The first track “If They Had Hearts” is a cry of anguish for a world that forgot compassion. It opens with lonely guitar riff, sounding like a distortion of an ancient folk melody. Layers of guitars and piano build upon this, developing into a full, rolling crescendo that suddenly cuts, leaving a delicate piano.
Likewise, the lead single “A Dance with Death” captures the perilous instability of our world.
Layers of foreboding, reverbed guitars are artfully combined with energetic crescendos. The art for the single complements these emotions – it shows a maimed, bleeding man on the verge of being swallowed by a great, ghastly bird.
Much of the album continues in the same flare. If “A Dance with Death” gazes into the near future and sees the house on fire, then “Everything Here is Black and Blinding” smells the smoke. The polyrhythmic guitar riff creates a compelling sense of instability as the track develops.
Amidst this despair, “Bloom (Murmurations at First Light)” gives an unexpected sense of hope. A certain sense of positivity emerges out of its ebb and flows, evoking the lighter moments of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. If at the dawn of a new day, flocks of starlings can be seen darting through the skies, then there is still something worth waking up for. Something worth fighting for.
The album’s heavy material is balanced well by a short piece of serene melancholy. “The Gloaming” features a guest appearance from Godspeed You! Black Emperor‘s Sophie Trudeau, arranging and performing violin. As it were, if the world passing into the night, then there is at least a serene beauty at twilight.
The final track “Blood Will Have Blood” clocks in at 27 minutes, almost half the album. It very much recapitulates the dark overtones of the first three tracks, taking a bleak and unrelenting gaze at the world’s injustice. This creates a pleasing structure to the album – the hope and serenity of “Bloom” and “The Gloaming” is balanced by the chaos and foreboding of the rest of the album. To genuinely entertain undercurrents of hope, a dark, impassioned look at the world’s pain is needed.
All in all, this album is darkly compelling – a novel and welcome contrast to some of their previous material. Across the album, the songwriting is excellent, showing a band confident in exploiting the full palette of emotions that post-rock offers. Whilst not attaining the sublime beauty in their finest material, A Single Flower is a fresh effort and impassioned response to the world of 2025.
7/10
A Single Flower releases July 4 via Bird’s Robe Records and can be pre-ordered here.