Godspeed move from apocalyptic lament to fragile hope, crafting their most human record yet.

In 2021, everyone’s favourite shadowy Montreal post-rock collective dropped their seventh full-length G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END. Musing on climate change and military intelligence in a post-pandemic world, the band’s apocalyptic preoccupations felt that little bit closer to home. The instrumental record sounded like a lament, a call to arms and, unusually so, a glint of hope.

Speechless in the face of atrocities unfolding in Gaza, new record NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD continues where its predecessor left off. The bleak subject matter is more explicit, and yet, improbably, the uplifting moments are more numerous. Three decades since they started, maybe the band’s famously doomer worldview is tempered with a newfound sentimentality, maybe the current state of the world simply requires it.

Album opener ‘SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS’ leads with an angular and fuzzy guitar refrain which in my mind recalls Jimi Hendrix playing Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. Like a counterculture icon performing an unlikely rendition of the American national anthem in the midst of the anti-Vietnam war movement, the shimmering serenity of this track feels punctured with irony. Still, the gradual addition of drums and strings never conjures the usual foreboding which tends to open a Godspeed record. It’s an uncharacteristically restrained opening salvo by their standards.

A defiant sense of optimism is clearest on the second track ‘BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD’. Faint guitar chords emerge from a fog of distortion and gradually grow more assured until the racing tremolo of Sophie Trudeau’s violin delivers an emotional pay-off up there with anything Godspeed have done before. I was lucky enough to watch the band play London’s Troxy in autumn of this year, but unwisely went with a crushing hangover. After the improvised guitar noise of opener Tashi Dorji had shaken my soul, it was this sublime and then-unreleased piece which brought me back.

In the lull of the final bridge you can hear fingers squeaking along guitar strings. This deliberate scrappiness introduces a sense of vulnerability – this is not Godspeed the famously inscrutable monolith, but fallible humans making music together. Gentle waves of instrumentation build and break into the droning intensity of the climax. It’s one of most epic and most affecting across the band’s astounding catalogue.

Godspeed are masterful at deploying different tones and textures across the sweeping movements in their music, but some of the contrasts here feel more blunt. A bombastic swagger emerges on ‘RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD’ that I find it hard to reconcile with the rest of the album. After a plaintive spoken word midsection delivered in Spanish, the track morphs into a blistering motorik beat which in my mind conjures the image of adrenaline junkies in souped-up vehicles rallying across the desert. It’s brilliantly done but tonally jarring.

When ‘PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS’ groans into life as a dissonant swirl of cymbals, strings and reverb, the dread really sets in. A simple guitar riff emerges before being unsettled by discordant screeching noises and a bell ringing, like an air-raid alarm heralding an incoming barrage. The track’s title suggests the idea of testimony and bearing witness, but ‘spectator’ implies a degree of detachment. It’s unclear whether this is a swipe at the inherent voyeurism of visual media, a self-reflexive take on this record itself, or maybe both.

Closer ‘GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS’ most clearly captures the record’s struggle between unrelenting violence and a battered but unbowed hopefulness. The 6-minute piece (economical in post-rock terms) launches into the band’s most thunderous sonic palette with reverb drenched guitars and crashing percussion. But where this would usually build and build, it all melts away halfway through. All that remains is a gentle dance between buoyant guitar chords and elegiac violin strings, surveying the devastation and seeking what survives.