Band:	Dawn Treader
Album:	Bloom & Decay
Style:	Blackgaze, Atmospheric black metal, Post-metal
Release date:	August 23, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Sunchaser
02. Idolator
03. Sky Burial
04. The Last Empire
05. Recusant
06. Iron Price
07. Effigies To Grief
08. Bloom & Decay

How can a debut album in a genre that had its time in the spotlight find its footing? Let's find out what it takes to make a blackgaze debut in 2024!

It might be a bit of a shock to most people to point it out, but next year marks the 20th anniversary of Alcest's Le Secret, a release that blended the bleak ferocity of metal with something more dreamlike and bright, often in the form of shoegaze (hence blackgaze) and post-rock. In the decade that followed, blackgaze was the zeitgeist of black metal, with a lot of interchange with other similar subgenres like screamo, atmospheric black metal, DSBM, post-metal, and everything else under the sun. But it's a conglomeration of sounds that, while it never really went away, has had its time and its stranglehold on the current sound of black metal has loosened up. It was as early as 2018 that I called the genre past its prime, and I agree that since then it was very rare for a new band in the genre to feel like it made much impact.

So you can imagine my surprise seeing the impact that Dawn Treader made. This is a project that started releasing music after I made my "past its prime" observation, releasing a couple of EPs that never reached me when they were fresh. Also worth noting that this is a one-man band of one Ross Connell, who doesn't seem to have any other credits, so there's no lineup connection that Dawn Treader could latch on to. All of the impact relies solely on whether Bloom & Decay can leave a mark or not. Perhaps some of it is because the oversaturation of the genre is less of a problem nowadays than it would've been ten years ago, but I genuinely think that there's something about the album that really hits the mark. And I can't deny that a lot of it is also because of how striking and gorgeous that cover art is.

One thing to notice about Bloom & Decay is that half of its tracks are instrumental, and I don't mean just the interludes, the opener and closer are both fully built and well-rounded songs at 5 and 11 minutes respectively, and yet they're fully instrumental. I would've expected that to make the moments with vocals stand out more, but the instrumental bits work so well to create and maintain momentum, in a way that they feel full even without vocals, so when the vocals do arrive it doesn't feel like as grand of a contrast. Don't get me wrong, Connell's shrieks are more than competent and they do work to elevate the album's emotional resonance. But also the most impactful vocal focused moments on the album are not the "musical ones", but rather how well the sampled speeches work towards the album feeling as emotionally impactful as it does. With the lyrics taken into consideration as well, it feels like Ashenspire and Panopticon ran through a blackgaze filter.

I don't think that Dawn Treader have it all figured out already. The production could work to be even more immersive, and the way an album like this sounds has always been a very important factor for how much it appeals to me. But what Dawn Treader have figured out is how to make blackgaze exciting in 2024 without needing to reinvent it.