There’s music you hear on the radio and television that tends to blend into the background and becomes the hum of every day life, and then there’s music that resonates deep in your soul and cuts to the quick of human existence. UK band Wildernesses definitely fall into the latter camp and deliver a sound that chimes deep in the listener’s psyche, and on previously unheard frequencies. Without releasing an album they’ve created a buzz with BBC Introducing and Total Rock amongst those championing the band, which means their first album comes laden with a weight of expectation. Rising to the challenge and delivering the nine track Growth, Wildernesses have produced a vast sonic vista that’s just waiting for the intrepid sonic explorer to chart its furthest reaches.

At the turn of the millennium there was a shift towards a brand of post-rock which dispensed with vocalists. That’s understandable because vocals are a very subjective thing and can turn off as many people as they turn on. Yet, a singer can also guide the listener and convey meaning in a way that instrumental music never could. Growth seems to have found a happy medium: containing two songs without vocals it suggests that Wildernesses aren’t going to paint themselves into a corner or be confined by genre constraints (which is a good thing) and that has given the band an exorbitant amount of freedom and they put it to great use over the course of forty minutes. However, opening track is what we’d generally consider instrumental post-rock, being a song that employs tone and tonality to great effect, subtly altering the listener’s physiology through the notes employed and timbres which are stretched to almost unbearable lengths. It perfectly illustrates the power of music as Wildernesses toy with our emotions like a cat plays with a mouse. Seguing into ‘Happy Hollow’, it is here when the vocals first appear, and rather than detracting from the music, they enhance it, acting like an instrument in itself; although the words are vitally important, it is more about the sounds of those words and how they impact on the audience and the likes of ‘Terrible Force’ reverberate strongly. Musically, too, Wildernesses are a multifaceted beast: with no two songs residing in the same ball park, Growth makes for the perfect calling card and a way for the band to show off their whole oeuvre.

Such is the all encompassing nature of this album that it will leave a huge void in your life at the conclusion of final track ‘Summertime, 1917’, yet such are the delights to be unearthed in Growth that you’ll soon be hitting ‘play’ again.

• Growth is released via Floodlit Recordings on 27th March 2026.

Track List:

1. Happy Hollow 
2. [dread.] 
3. English Darkness
4. Terrible Bloom 
5. Maintenance
6. Cassino 
7. Four Hour Drive
8. Summertime, 1917