Album Review: Solars – A Fading Future (Ripcord Records)

Building from three promising EPs, ‘A Fading Future’ is the debut full-length album from UK instrumental post-rock band, Solars. It will be released on vinyl, CD, and digital formats on September 6th through Ripcord Records.

A band that often, with ease, creates thick layers of atmosphere and emotion. Solars debut album is an album of feeling, but from a wide array of thought-provoking angles. The first of which is based within the inescapable reality of environmental destruction on opener Holocene. It doesn’t get more sobering than the voice of David Attenborough, but Solars’ instrumental direction here gives this track an even darker and moody feel.

It is a harbinger of things to come as A Fading Future casts a critical eye over the state of things, but also finds the band willing to look inward too.

It really does speak volumes about this band’s talent that all of this, and so much more, comes through strongly without vocals or lyrics. Solars are exceptionally good at telling a story through their instrumental sound only, delivering something quite urgent and riffy with Retrograde. If you want to feel vitality coursing through your veins, a track like this will deliver that injection. Before some robust heaviness is brought to the forefront of the album’s sound with Doomscrolling. Yet, this is also a track with groovy rhythms, eccentric twists, and a constant intensity that even makes the melodic moments have a tense feel.

An album of varied ideas, the title track is a firm favourite simply because it brings forth some progressive aspects. Displayed across a seven-plus-minute ‘epic’ that takes on a more melancholic form and has more traditional post sounds. This is a very creative Solars indeed and it’s a spectacular listen.

Of course, so is A Hill to Die On and Inertia. With the former’s peppy heaviness getting stuck in the brain matter. While the latter’s shimmering guitar soundscape and methodical drum beats gives it a weirder, but likable, flavour. Leading to an ending called Ablation, a track that is wrought by emotion as it has such a personal motif (inspired by the dissolution of a marriage and all the feelings and changes that come with that).

A Fading Future showcases an array of instrumental delights that moves, stage by stage, through varying degrees of effective and varied post rock and metal soundscapes. All while sounding brilliantly cohesive and exceptionally captivating. Solars have well and truly delivered on this debut full-length.

Solars – A Fading Future Track Listing:

1. The Holocene
2. Retrograde
3. Doomscrolling
4. A Fading Future
5. A Hill to Die On
6. Inertia
7. Ablation

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