Rolo Tomassi - Where Myth Becomes Memory (2022)

Rolo Tomassi’s evolutionary journey has been a pleasure to behold. Over the course of their kaleidoscopic career, the Sheffield quartet have pivoted from teenage mathcore anarchists, who announced themselves with the demented, precocious 2008 debut, Hysterics, to genre-bending masters of tone, texture and colour. Honing their own take on post-hardcore with every release, they always stayed one step ahead of an ever-decreasing pool of peers.

After 2015’s Grievances and 2018’s Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It, which saw them magnify the dynamic interplay between light and shade, their sixth album feels like another natural progression. While Drip, with its exhilarating, tension-and-release build-up, and Mutual Ruin go for the jugular, ethereal opener Almost Always and ballad Closer display the band’s most confident use of atmosphere and space yet. The former builds to a trembling wall of dense, twinkling shoegaze before the latter, a barely there piano ballad, explodes into the kind of shimmering, instrumental firework display worthy of post-rock luminaries Maybeshewill or This Will Destroy You.

While in the early days, Tomassi’s disorientating racket was powered by chaos, stitching together jazz, prog and classical influences with chunky, jagged threads, the fluidity between the various elements of their sound now feels natural and unforced. Towering single Cloaked is the most metal the band have ever sounded, with a darkly epic riff that bends around frenetic and celestial vocals from Eva Korman. Labyrinthine zig-zags between nightmarish tones and blissful relief, while closer The End Of Eternity is a blackgaze track woven tightly into a bright-eyed, post-rock dreamscape. Where Myth Becomes Memory feels like Rolo Tomassi have finally perfected their sound, but for a band dedicated to perpetual motion, it’s unlikely this spells the end of their progression.

~ Dannii Leivers, loudersound.com