“Lately I’ve become more aware of the cost of convenience, how the choices I make as a consumer seem insignificant, but can add up to something disastrous.” So explains Peter Silberman of The Antlers when speaking about the origins of the project’s seventh album Blight, coming this autumn via Transgressive. The record, written over several years and mostly recorded at Silberman’s home studio in upstate New York, utilises The Antlers’ distinctive mix of raw emotion and almost otherworldly arrangements to cast the present moment in a new light. One able to take something familiar and apparently ordinary and reveal it as anything but, be that the calamitous consequences of our consumerist culture or else the oft-ignored beauty of the natural world which stands to be lost as a result. As Silberman concludes: “These songs were born out of an attempt to come to grips with my guilt.”
Opening with what could be mistaken for an emergency alarm, lead single ‘Carnage’ introduces these themes with equal parts anger and grief. The Antlers have long possessed the uncanny ability to take subtle, introspective tones and blow them widescreen, and the new single is no different. A track which morphs from sparse, plaintive beginnings into a full band swirl, its stark imagery detailing not only the cost of humanity’s current mode of living but how we so often remain oblivious to the damage wrought. “’Carnage’ is a song about a kind of violence we rarely acknowledge,” Silberman explains. “Violence not born of cruelty, but of convenience. Innocent creatures are swept up in the path of destruction as their world collides with ours, and we barely notice.”
Accidental damage,
casually maimed
Incidental carnage,
collateral pain
Watch the lyric video created by Ryan Hover below:
Blight is out on the 10th October via Transgressive and you can pre-order it now from The Antlers Bandcamp page.
Artwork by Ryan Hoover