Band:	Infant Island
Album:	Obsidian Wreath
Style:	Screamo, Shoegaze, Post hardcore, Post rock
Release date:	January 2024

01. Another Cycle
02. Fulfilled
03. Found Hand
04. Clawing, Still
05. Veil
06. Amaranthine
07. With Shadow
08. Unrelenting
09. Kindling
10. Vestygian

Do you ever feel like you can't quite cope with the state of the world? Does that make you furious?

We're entering a time when there will be less and less albums written specifically in the pandemic of 2020, something that is already starting to feel like a distant and nauseating memory, and music written within that context does have an emotional angle that seems to reawaken them. But Obsidian Wreath, despite being written in 2020, doesn't overtly feel like a "pandemic record" and a lot of its "fury in mourning" themes seem more relevant now than they did when it was conceived. The threat of another world war, constant reminders of death tolls, the threat of situations even more unstable, and of the collapse of how peaceful life seemed to be. Even without being directly affected by the worst of world events, there's a growing anxiety in the air, signaling that you should be afraid of things only getting worse. How could you not feel hopeless and distraught and extremely angry at the world? Especially when you care about so much about the things that could be lost?

There is something about how the very common genre marriage of screamo and post-rock can hit an emotional resonance with those very feelings I've described. The world may not have always been in this exact state, but there is something universal about that anxiety and struggling to have hope. Struggle has always existed. So has loss, and the fear of it. So has rage. That very intense mix of emotions, one that still finds room to remind you about the fact that beauty still exists lives within that very genre mix. Intense darkness in the screamo, intense beauty in the post-rock. And a lot of what works about Infant Island's Obsidian Wreath is that emotional appeal in abstract. Even discounting the musical ways in which that emotional aspect is brought to life, the impact is undeniable. It's quite a cathartic experience to be able to get this kind of enjoyment from music rather than just enjoying a cool riff or a vicious blast beat.

Musically as well, there's a lot to appreciate in how that genre blend really goes all in on combining rather extreme ends of each side of the emotional and musical spectrum. The screamo side is felt most closely in the blast beats and the vicious vocal performance. The post-rock side dives quite a lot on the lighter side of things while also integrating a very interesting array of sounds with a lot of ambiance and a lot of orchestrations. The production does its best to also emphasize that intensity, with some of its heaviest moments feeling dissonant and dense in a very suffocating way, while its lighter moments also having that dense feeling, leaving some moments to feel muddier in the mix than I'd hope, and leaving so much dense intensity even in the mellowest moments can be quite tiring, as much as that's probably the point. If there is one band that Obsidian Wreath reminds me most, it's New Bermuda-era Deafheaven, but with even more Mono in the post-rock side, and with a smidge of Panopticon in the more atmospheric black metal moments.

Somewhere around the middle of the record, the members of Infant Island as well as guests and friends from bands like Undeath, .GIF From God, Mikau, or Malevich shout in unison "All darkness, all blood; all cynics, for what? This world is enough." Maybe we need to be reminded of that sometimes.