Band:	Atlases
Album:	Between The Day & I
Style:	Djent, Post-metal
Release date:	June 2023

01. Eyelids Of The New Dawn
02. Singulars
03. Silent Threads
04. Earthshine
05. Mosaic Of Silence
06. Save Room
07. Intermission
08. Versus
09. Imperial Dark
10. Ties To Distance

Often when bands significantly change style, they either move from a sound that listeners are fond of to one that they’re less keen on, or vice versa. With Between The Day & I, Atlases transition from a genre I love to another one I love, and dare me to find fault in their efforts: challenge accepted.

My introduction to Atlases was their 2020 sophomore release Woe Portrait, a solid album that was recognizably part of the post-metal scene. There are elements of post-metal here still, but they feel like a minor component now; I would categorize Between The Day & I as a djent record above anything else. Now, post-metal and djent aren’t complete strangers to one another; Herod have been making waves with a sound that draws from both styles, while I was very fond of Monosphere’s debut record in 2021. Heck, if releases of this kind keep coming, maybe we’ll be lucky enough to get to a point where I can start using the term ‘post-djent’, just for the fun of seeing how many people recoil in disgust at the thought of it. As far as this attempt from Atlases is concerned, I do like it, but I’m not entirely taken by it.

When revisiting Woe Portrait there are hints that a crunchier sound such as this may have been coming in the future, mainly due to a couple of tracks such as closing song “Marta”. By the same token, there are still songs here that keep Atlases connected to post-metal, chief of all “Earthshine”. This track revels for significant portions in subdued, quiet clean passages, and overlays post-rock tremolos in the segments where the volume is initially turned up, before reaching a climax in intensity late on. “Save Room” covers very similar tonal ground to “Earthshine”, albeit with some added electronica in the quieter moments and a slightly denser tone to the heaviest moments.

However, these songs do feel like more of a minority here, and while post-rock/metal elements seep into other tracks, they are, in the majority, built upon mid/fast-tempo djent riffing akin to that used by numerous modern metalcore groups, with cleaner choruses incorporated into several tracks (“Versus”), as well as very occasional snippets of Invent Animate-esque quasi-ambience. As far as these features on the tracklist are concerned, I find Atlases more compelling in the faster, more intense moments, such as on “Eyelids Of The New Dawn”; in these passages, they remind me a bit of the weight Herod managed to infuse into Iconoclast.

Overall, though, as much as I have my fair share of favourite acts within djent, it’s not a style I will necessarily drool over at the mere sound of to quite the extent that I do with well-made post-metal. The knock-on effect of that is, when I compare songs such as “Singulars” and “Versus” to some of the djent-based highlights of 2023 thus far, I do find them somewhat underwhelming. Atlases do have the ability to impress in their new form here, but it’s not really when they’re going with the djent-core approach on these tracks. Instead, the more compelling cuts here are the dreamier, more morose “Silent Threads”, which finds a good balance between djent and post-rock/shoegaze sounds, and the more groove-oriented duo of “Mosaic Of Silence” and “Imperial Dark”.

The last song of note, and the last song on the album, is its longest, “Ties To Distance”. A lengthy, ominous introduction sets the tone nicely, and the following journey features some neat riffs, and a notable shift in the verses to a sound more reminiscent of alternative metal with its throbbing electronics. The shimmering textures that are used later in the song in tandem with the dense, polyrhythmic riffs work really well. Of all the songs on Between The Day & I, “Ties To Distance” sounds the closest to a musical synthesis that Atlases can build upon to render their stylistic shift more successful next time out.

In the words of Chef Slowik, Between The Day & I is good, but it’s not great. It’s respectable as evidence of a band unwilling to be confined to a single niche, and of one that’s able to get on top of the fundamentals of the new style at the first time of asking. At the same time, I’m just not engaging with it on the level of their previous release, so I hope that in time, it ends up representing a prototype effort from the band that was ultimately followed by a more compelling vision of this new sound.