Spook The Horses Empty Body

After the calm and sublime People Used To Live Here, Spook THE Horses, hailing from Wellington, New Zealand deliver their ferocious new album, Empty Body. With distortion levels cranked up, tempoes sped up and songs condensed and stripped down to the bare, ugly essentials, Empty Body comes as a brutal wake-up call within the rampant covid-19 fatigue, and an unexpected surprise in almost every regard. "We've always been both a heavy and a quiet band. An entire album of our prettier, more bittersweet inclinations demands a reply of our most aggressive and confrontational. The pendulum must swing back the other way", comments multi-instrumentalist Callum Gay. Imagine: if band members can rotate between instrument positions within the band, because every band member can play every instrument, then this must imply a seldom degree of freedom and mutual musical understanding... something that most bands could only dream of. Spook THE Horses are such a band. Maybe this multi-instrumentalism and virtuosity also explains the vast musical territory that is explored between the band's 4 albums: while 2011's debut album Brighter was defined by sweet post-rock crescendos, 2015's Rainmaker was a much heavier affair. People Used To Live Here“ (2017) created an atmosphere of quiet desolation, raw and real, desperate and unsettling: the post-apocalyptic soundtrack to abandoned places, where people used to live, at one point in time, long ago.