Five years after the release of their self-titled debut album, somesurprises are returning this week—like all of us, hopefully, half a decade removed from 2019—totally renewed on their follow-up full-length Perseids. Named after a particularly dense meteor shower, the record showcases the band’s evolved sense of shoegaze textures which on many of the tracks feel completely impenetrable even while the compositions remain far removed from the heavier sounds within the genre popular on the East Coast at the moment.
The band has PNW heavy-rock royalty Jessika Kenney and Lori Goldston to thanks for that, with the pair of composers boasting contributions to recordings from Nirvana, Sunn O))), and Wolves in the Throne Room between the two of them. Yet throughout most of the album (save for dreamy instrumental stretches such as the five-minute “Snakes and Ladders”), the spotlight remains on vocalist and band leader Natasha El-Sergany, whose voice often takes a form that resembles either the ambient-pop coos of Lætitia Sadier or the doomier tones of Kris Esfandiari when fronting her dream-pop project Miserable.
Written in the early days of pandemic-necessitated isolation, El-Sergany notes that Persieds is largely the product of old iterations of our personal, political, and societal lives dying off only to give way to a dramatically new world in a jarringly short period of time. “The album was influenced by starlit camping, growing political and social unrest, Islamic spirituality, and relationships that deepened or fell apart in surprising ways as yet another chapter of the world seemed to be ending.”
With the LP officially arriving tomorrow via Doom Trip Records, check out an early stream below. You can also pre-order it here.
