Sunbather

I’ll preface this review by saying I really wanted to like this album. I told myself that I wouldn’t listen to it until I heard 3 post-metal albums in a row that I liked to prove to myself that I was willing to give the genre a chance. And today that finally happened! I really didn’t know what to expect going into this. I knew it was controversial among metalheads for “not being trve kvlt enough,” and I was guessing that was because it sounded overly happy (like previous blackgaze I’d heard, such as Agriculture), was overproduced, or maybe had some clean vocals in it or something.

What I didn’t expect was for it to be AGONIZINGLY FUCKING BORING. Seriously, this was some of the most boring shit I can even remember listening to, aside from some garbage-tier underground doom metal albums nobody’s ever heard of before.
First off, you know how sometimes albums have an instrumental interlude between songs? Usually it’s to improve cohesion and album flow at the expense of adding a small amount of filler (not saying they’re always filler, they just usually end up feeling that way with a couple exceptions). Well this album puts one after EVERY. FUCKING. SONG. And these are for the most part the blandest sounding things in the world, too. They literally sound like royalty free “inspirational” slop that would play over some corporation’s video pitch. The one exception is when there’s an entirely random harsh noise wall in the middle of “Please Remember,” which I can only assume is there to wake up anyone who fell asleep during the first half of the album. If there’s any other purpose this harsh noise wall serves, please let me know because I can’t think of any — the album never builds on it, does anything with it, or otherwise acknowledges it afterward, it’s just randomly there and makes you wonder “wtf even was that” like the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The worst part about the interludes is they’re not just one or even two minutes long like these things usually are, either. They’re 3:13, 4:42, and 6:26(!!), combining for a total of 14:21. A quarter of this album is pure filler right off the bat.

So, what about the actual songs? They’re better, but that’s not saying much. The most immediate problem is that they just… sound like complete shit?
Good mixing stacks different layers of sound on top of each other so they can all impact the listener. While not the same kind of music at all, a great example for reference is the song “Just Like You Imagined” by Nine Inch Nails — there’s a lot happening, but you can make it all out clearly and the result is that it’s extremely immersive. In Sunbather, to return to the same analogy, it’s like the sounds of everything are just crammed into one layer and smeared together into a homogenous mess where everything blurs together. The result is the musical equivalent of taking multiple colors on a palette and mixing all of them to make one ugly shade of brown, and then only painting with that brown over your entire canvas.
The album could really benefit from anything sounding “sharp.” The guitar tone is extremely dull, and there’s way too much reverb or something, liquefying it into the aforementioned uniform soup of noise. The drums sound dull too. The vocals are actually pretty good and are the closest to sounding sharp, but they’re way too damn quiet in the mix for some reason, like the band were trying not to wake up their parents in the other room. As a result, in the moments where the music is doing things that should sound interesting, it really brings it down; in the moments where it’s not doing anything interesting (and there are plenty), it makes it an absolute slog.

The writing isn’t any better. All of the actual songs are bloated to about twice as long as they’d need to be to contain all the musical ideas within them. However, the biggest problem with the writing for me though is that it has no emotional impact on me whatsoever. I saw a ton of people praising this album for being so emotionally powerful, and I honestly don’t know what part of this I was supposed to get that from.
The best parts of Sunbather in this regard sound emotionless, and the worst parts come off as “fake emotional,” like those shitty Youtuber apology videos where they pretend to cry or whatever (yeah ik I’m using a lot of comparisons in this review, whatever). It just doesn’t feel genuine whatsoever. The most egregious case of this is “The Pecan Tree.” There’s this godawful piano that comes in and repeats the same 4 notes for minutes on end. “Dream house” is pretty bad about this too.
I don’t know why exactly it fails so hard here for me, but I think the production contributes to the problem as well by making everything feel less impactful. But it definitely can’t help that none of the riffs came off as especially potent.

The one part of the album I actually liked was the stretch on “Vertigo” from about 4:00 to about 10:30. It has a guitar solo and then gradually builds up in intensity to a crescendo. Then the energy it was building just completely dies and the song proceeds to meander in place for the next 4 minutes until it ends and the next filler segment starts, but still, that’s more than nothing! Probably the main reason why I’m not rating this even lower!

To conclude the review, I just want to state that I don’t want to gatekeep metal and I don’t consider people who like Sunbather to be “posers who don’t like real metal” or anything stupid like that. I really respect what this album’s done to introduce people to metal, and I think what it’s done for metal as a whole is very positive. It was just a massive letdown for me, especially after seeing the praise it’s gotten from people on here.