Wolves in the Throne RoomEstuary

Wolves in the Throne Room is one of those rare bands that went five years without a full-length, minding its own business out in the woods and not sucking up to anybody. Primordial Arcana came out in 2021, the Crypt of Ancestral Knowledge EP turned up in between in 2023, and that's it. Now Estuary is out: six tracks, forty-eight minutes or so (that running time isn't from an official source, so I'm not calling it exact).

The concept is wild. Civilisation ended a thousand years ago and the forest has taken the cities back. Old spirits wander the ruins, there are temples running on a patched-up power grid, and whole religions have grown up around rotting wind turbines. Throw in mutant creatures, open gateways and the rest. A cult that worships wind turbines is reason enough on its own to buy the album, if you ask me (I worship my electricity bill anyway, but that's another story). The band recorded it themselves, mostly at their own studio, Owl Lodge, in Olympia. Nicholas Wilbur's drums, though, were tracked in Anacortes at The Unknown, a studio in a converted church. The label is selling this as the band's rawest, most playful work and says black metal has been mixed with noisy industrial textures. That's the label talking, of course.

The verdict, though, comes from the numbers, not from them. Let me say this up front: all I've got is what's on paper and what people who've heard it are saying. Reviews score it between 8 and 9 out of 10, and Kerrang! gave it 4 out of 5. Everybody zeroes in on the same things: a sound that smells analogue but is massive, vocals you can actually make out compared to before, choirs and organ textures. The tracks that get named most are "Knights of Tiamat" and the roughly eight-minute first single "Ghosts Among the Obelisks". There's a complaint too, and a fair one: almost every track walks in through the same door, ambience or feedback first, then the riffs. Not much in the way of interludes or folk touches either. Those breathing spaces were exactly what held the band's best albums together, and that's where it hurts.

On the lineup, Relapse's credits say Nathan Weaver, Kody Keyworth, touring bassist Galen Baudhuin and Wilbur. I couldn't find a primary source saying Aaron Weaver is on this record, and I'm not about to make one up.

A cult that worships wind turbines is reason enough on its own to buy the album, if you ask me (I worship my electricity bill anyway, but that's another story).

The vinyl goes for 24.99 to 28.99 dollars, and some of the coloured pressings are limited to 100, 141 and 233 copies. Silver forest shimmer, whatever that is (what does that even mean?). Buy the black one, the music's the same music.

Why not a higher score? If all six tracks open the same way, after a while the album starts sounding like a copy of itself, and that's a minus in my book. Why not lower? Because five years on they come back with a concept, a production they did with their own hands and two heavy tracks almost everyone agrees on, and they feed off their own roots instead of whatever's lying around. Staying on your feet without selling out, in a genre that keeps repeating itself, is no small thing. Buy it...