Since bursting out of Cardiff in 2015, HIMALAYAS have set about creating a legacy as big as their name warrants. It’s a remit they look likely to fill with their sophomore album BAD STAR. Featuring ten tracks which find the band looking beyond the indie-rock of their debut album (2023’s From Hell To Here) to deliver an album far greater in scope, and with a sound that’s big enough to match their ambition. While there’s been no radical overhaul in their modus operandi, BAD STAR bristles with confidence and is an album with real crossover appeal, evidencing a band more than ready to take it to the next level.

As you’d expect from a band with the name HIMALAYAS (and presented in caps), this quartet certainly know how to pack a punch, yet their sound is also richly textured and full of light and shade for contrast, and opening song ‘Beneath The Barrel’ is something of a slow builder which adds sound, almost imperceptibly, so the listener is encased within a wall of sonics before they realise it. It would of easy for the band to arrive with all fists flying and guitars blazing (there’s plenty of time for that later), but they take a route that evidences a maturity and musical growth between albums. It’s a moody opener and one that sets things up nicely for the following ‘Hung Up’. It’s here where the band let fly with a tasty riff and foot heavy on the (distortion) pedal and proves they can do the visceral as well as they do the cerebral.

BAD STAR harks back to an age when the album was king. While it is perfectly feasible to dip in and out of this album and enjoy the songs individually (indeed, several of these songs have already been released as singles), this is an album best experienced in one sitting to fully appreciate its ebb and flow. There’s the huge white space inserted into the aforementioned ‘Hung Up’, the achingly beautiful mid-section on ‘Heavy Weather’, and the ethereal, otherworldly outro on ‘Nothing Higher’, all of which conspire to turn BAD STAR into a kind of musical hall of mirrors with sound reflected in all directions. The lithe is paired with the heavy, the loud with the quiet, with each acting as a foil to highlight and enhance the other. When consumed whole, the album has the feel of a journey with the band taking the listener to some heady highs and corresponding lows and that means final track ‘A Brand New God’ brings a sense of closure and finality.

The deafening silence that follows ‘A Brand New God’ will leave a huge void in its wake, but on the strength of this album, HIMALAYAS will be around to fill it.

• BAD STAR is distributed via Nettwerk Music Group on 25th April 2025 (available here).
  
• Official Website | Facebook | YouTube Channel

Track List:

1. Beneath The Barrel

2. Hung Up

3. Cave Paintings

4. What If…?

5. Heavy Weather

6. Surrender

7. Nothing Higher

8. Afterlife

9. Twisted Reflections

10. A Brand New God