With their third album, 2003’s The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, Austin’s Explosions in the Sky forged a particularly romantic, earthy form of post-rock that won the group accolades and set the tone for the genre for years to come. Thanks in part to that LP, the band was tapped to soundtrack Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights film, which in turn inspired W. G. Snuffy Walden’s iconic theme song for the TV version. For a while there in the late aughts, you couldn’t turn on a TV without a tangle of loping guitar lines forcing you to contemplate your mortality.
The band has mostly kept quiet since 2011’s Take Care, Take Care, Take Care—in 2013 they soundtracked the Mark Wahlberg film Lone Survivor and David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche—but today they’ve announced their sixth LP, The Wilderness, which is due out April 1 on Temporary Residence. In a bit of a shakeup, the album was co-produced by John Congleton (St. Vincent, Modest Mouse), who has worked with the band before, but never at this level; The Wilderness is the first Explosions in the Sky record not entirely produced by the band. You can hear the first fruits of that collaboration below in “Disintegration Artist Anxiety,” a quiet lamentation that sits right at the center of the album.
The Wilderness track list
“Wilderness”
“The Ecstatics”
“Tangle Formations”
“Logic of a Dream”
“Disintegration Anxiety”
“Losing the Light”
“Infinite Orbit”
“Colors in Space”
“Landing Cliffs”
The Wilderness is out April 1 on Temporary Residence.
