From the sunny sub-tropical beaches of Northern Queensland, Australia, comes the wintry atmospheric black metal of one man band Afterwalker, although black metal is really a loose term in this case. A good portion of this self-titled release’s half hour run time is given over to hammering blast beats, tremolo picked chords and harsh shrieks, but this music actually has way more in common with the work of classical composer Phillip Glass and the sonic haze of shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine than it does with any metal bands – which isn’t surprising as the man behind this project is D.P. Pearce, also responsible for the one-man dreamy shoegaze project Kigo.
While there has been a proliferation of shoegaze-inspired black metal bands cropping up in the past few years, most notable of which is probably Deafheaven, this music isn’t really anything like that either.
Opener ‘Callus’ is one of the most sublimely beautiful pieces of music in any genre, all lo-fi tape hiss, acoustic fingerpicking, gentle synth and ghostly whispered vocals that falls somewhere between the elvish ambient leanings of Sigur Ros and the ethereal hymns of Grouper. This track sets the stage for a trilogy of long-form rockers in which Afterwalker brings the metal, but rather than alternating between mellow passages and harsh black metal like Deafheaven and their ilk, Afterwalker completely combines the two together to create something that sounds almost like Loveless fed through a distortion pedal and layered with blast beats and screams.
This music is melodic and dreamy even by black metal standards, a genre that, despite all the emphasis on primitivism and aggression, has always held those two things in high regard. Chords and notes shift and twist in unexpected ways in an impressionistic wash of distortion and reverb, and this is where the Phillip Glass connection comes in. Like in the experimental early works of that modern classical composer (see Music For Interchanging Parts and Music For Two Pianos) Pearce lays down themes that repeat hypnotically ad infinitum, gradually introducing almost imperceptible changes in such a way that by the end of a track everything has changed and you can’t even point to when this change actually occurred.
These tracks use traditional black metal instrumentation and tropes but they could just as easily be all synthesisers or an orchestra and work just as well.
Anyone interested should definitely also check out Pearce’s other project Kigo, because the two truly are musical brothers. Where Kigo is the sun-bleached acid haze of day, Afterwalker charts the moments just before dawn and just after dusk, not the absolute pitch black of midnight but the eerie tranquility of those spaces where the darkness and the light vie for equal space. The most achingly beautiful moments on this release come when the light triumphs, if only fleetingly, and the melody shines through all the distortion and repetition (see about 2.20 into ‘Left To Burn’), like the sun breaking through the clouds over a violent ocean.
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