The follow-up to 2021’s rustic, folk-tinged Green to Gold, Blight asks many questions without offering easy answers. Over the course of nine new songs, the Antlers’ founder and primary songwriter Silberman reckons with our passively destructive tendencies – absentminded pollution, unwitting wastefulness, and the inadvertent devastation of the natural world. But despite its heavy themes, Blight is far from a punishing listen. With its adventurous arrangements and persistent momentum, it plays more like an iridescent odyssey.The album was recorded over the course of a few years, with the lion’s share tracked and produced in Silberman’s home studio in upstate New York, a compact outbuilding perched at the edge of a neighbor’s sprawling hayfield.“So much of the record was conceived while walking these massive fields,” he says...
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The follow-up to 2021’s rustic, folk-tinged Green to Gold, Blight asks many questions without offering easy answers. Over the course of nine new songs, the Antlers’ founder and primary songwriter Silberman reckons with our passively destructive tendencies – absentminded pollution, unwitting wastefulness, and the inadvertent devastation of the natural world. But despite its heavy themes, Blight is far from a punishing listen. With its adventurous arrangements and persistent momentum, it plays more like an iridescent odyssey.The album was recorded over the course of a few years, with the lion’s share tracked and produced in Silberman’s home studio in upstate New York, a compact outbuilding perched at the edge of a neighbor’s sprawling hayfield.“So much of the record was conceived while walking these massive fields,” he says. “I felt like I was wandering around an abandoned planet.”And in a sense, Blight does feel like science fiction, sounding as if it were delivered from the near future. The album is a work of meticulous world-building, teeming with ear candy and surprising stylistic shifts. While many songs begin with sparse elements— a fingerpicked guitar, hypnotic organ stabs, or a nimble piano melody — they rarely remain tethered to their foundations. They often reimagine themselves partway through, shifting mid-track from gentle ballad to throbbing electronica, only to land somewhere entirely different by the end.Silberman has been confronting weighty matters ever since The Antlers’ 2009 breakthrough Hospice, an unrelentingly heavy concept album about a child cancer patient and her caregiver that addressed psychological abuse and post-traumatic stress with explicit detail and unflinching vulnerability, resonating equally with those grieving loved ones and rocky relationships. The album’s ambitious sonics— an unlikely amalgam of intimate folk confessionals, haunted soundscapes, and sky-scraping post-rock— belied its modest origins: Hospice was mostly recorded alone in Silberman’s Brooklyn bedroom, with an economy of equipment and hardly any expectant audience. The surprise popularity of Hospice placed the Antlers on a rapid ascent, touring globally, playing major festivals, and supporting such luminaries as The National and Explosions in the Sky.The music that followed grew The Antlers’ sizable following while resisting the impulse to rehash their initial success. The electronic pop of 2011’s Burst Apart, the aquatic psychedelia of 2012’s Undersea EP, and the brass-laden soul of 2014’s Familiars all embraced the band’s ingenuity while simultaneously subverting expectations, expanding the band’s emotional palette beyond the morose rage and desperation that characterized Hospice to reveal a playful expansiveness. The Antlers further pushed the boundaries as a live entity, trading the lush orchestration of their ambitious recordings for wall-of-sound maximalism and thunderous dynamics.Sadly, Silberman was forced to scale back after an unexpected hearing incident left him temporarily deaf in one ear and hypersensitive to sound. Putting The Antlers on pause, he made 2017’s Impermanence, a meditative and minimal solo album, pairing his then-fragile voice with gentle guitar and an abundance of silence. After regaining his hearing and recovering from vocal cord surgery, Silberman and longtime drummer Michael Lerner revived The Antlers for 2021’s Green to Gold, a collection of songs notably devoid of the darkness that characterized the band’s previous work.Following Green to Gold, Silberman honed his collaborative chops, including co-producing Wild Pink’s critically-acclaimed breakout ILYSM. Shortly thereafter, he released the debut album from Cowboy Sadness, his instrumental band with David Moore (Bing & Ruth) and Nicholas Principe (Port St. Willow).During these intervening years between Antlers albums, Silberman and Lerner kept busy as well, releasing a series of free-standing singles unified by The Antlers’ gift for acid-dipped timbres, shape-shifting production, and impressionistic imagery.“These singles were metaphysical songs about connection with nature, which in turn put me in touch with all the ways that nature is under threat,” he says. “The smell of wildfire smoke on a sunny afternoon, the sound of chainsaws on a hike through the woods — these contradictions became impossible to ignore.”Whereas The Antlers have previously dealt in extended metaphors, Blight now takes a more direct approach. In “Calamity,” for instance, Silberman asks point-blank: “Who will look after what we leave behind?” The final and perhaps fundamental question posed by Blight appears in the penultimate track, the tragically relevant futuristic hymnal “A Great Flood”, in which he wonders: “Will we be forgiven should there come a great flood to drown out our decisions?” This question hangs in the air unanswered. Blight invites listeners to consider it for themselves, as if the survival of the natural world is in their hands, slowly slipping through their fingertips.
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