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Abronia – Shapes Unravel – 20/02/26

To unlock Shapes Unravel, you have to spend time with its cover art. A woman in red, her fist clenched, pasted between crags and crevices. She is facing a black tombstone, potentially a shrine, that stalks her, its central eye wide and unnerving. It looms over her, as though it floats amongst the mountain tops. The tension of the two figures is reinforced by the distant peaks, a great chasm separating the foreground and the background.

This is Abronia’s style. During their vast soundscapes, a world is created in which to inhabit. Geography is laid down through their varied instrumentation, their dabbling in different genres colouring each location with a unique but wholly consistent atmosphere. At the centre, vocalist Keelin Mayer stands off against the brass, the pedal steel, the ritualistic drums, her coat donned, her fist clenched, staring down and embracing the mystery.

‘New Imposition’ warbles awake with its tremeloed guitars, before bursting into a sprint. Mayer locks into chants and refrains, the song building until her final maddened scream. ‘Mirrored Ends Of Light’ slips into a swagger of sly desert intrigue, the sliding pedal steel yowling in the background like a bobcat in a saloon, Robert Grubaugh’s 32-inch bass drum galloping. ‘Weapons Against Progress’ heads east, its rhythm slinking. It spends almost three-minutes quietly sidling up beside you before Mayer delivers a Welchian outburst to chisel the groove into perpetuity.

Shapes Unravel mixes psychedelia, desert noir, Eastern drone, avant-jazz, doom, post-punk, and acid-folk into an exploration of epic proportions, but this expanse also allows room for something deeper. The first half of ‘Walker’s Dead Birds’ reminds me of something more Gaelic, sounding wistful, brow-beaten but still standing, before drifting into a tangle of tenor sax and tambourine. ‘Petals and Sand’ is a syllabic menace though sustained guitar feedback and a prowling rhythm section, and ‘Gemini’ takes its astrological theme and twirls it on a moortop like Kate Bush. By the time you reach ‘Asleep in a Porcelain House’, you’re swept away on an ‘Eclipse’-esque slurry of cymbals, triumphant.

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