After the calm and sublime People Used To
Live Here, SPOOK THE HORSES, hailing
from Wellington, New Zealand deliver their
ferocious new album, Empty Body. With
distortion levels cranked up, tempoes sped
up and songs condensed and stripped down
to the bare, ugly essentials, Empty Body
comes as a brutal wake-up call within the
rampant covid-19 fatigue, and an
unexpected surprise in almost every regard.
„We've always been both a heavy and a
quiet band. An entire album of our prettier,
more bittersweet inclinations demands a
reply of our most aggressive and confrontational.
The pendulum must swing back the other way“, comments multi-instrumentalist Callum Gay.
Imagine: if band members can rotate between instrument positions within the band, because every
band member can play every instrument, then this must imply a seldom degree of freedom and
mutual musical understanding... something that most bands could only dream of. SPOOK THE
HORSES are such a band. Maybe this multi-instrumentalism and virtuosity also explains the vast
musical territory that is explored between the band's 4 albums: while 2011's debut album Brighter
was defined by sweet post-rock crescendos, 2015's Rainmaker was a much heavier affair. People
Used To Live Here“ (2017) created an atmosphere of quiet desolation, raw and real, desperate and
unsettling: the post-apocalyptic soundtrack to abandoned places, where people used to live, at one
point in time, long ago.
